[josephg]

The most useful application I see is moving toward building local first software[1].

And as for optimizations, my approach is surprisingly non systematic. I think about the program on the whole, and think through & investigate where all the time is being spent. There's usually ways to restructure things so the hottest code path runs faster. Sometimes that involves changing data structures or languages. Sometimes it just needs early returns for common cases, or inlining string libraries and things like that to avoid allocations.

Sometimes it helps to imagine yourself going through by hand the drudgery the computer is doing. If I was actually doing that boring work by hand, there's almost always ways I'd start taking short cuts. All thats left then is programming those shortcut into the computer.

[1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html