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by austin-cheney 570 days ago
* Recursive file system management tools. Most developers cannot navigate a tree model and cower in great fear

* performance analysis/monitoring tools. Most developers are astoundingly bad at performance and then lie about it with weird unfounded guesses

* markdown to html parser or the opposite. Most developers have no idea the actual cost of involvement required for basic string parsing and wrongly believe it’s free

* network proxy. Aside from authentication this is mind blowingly simple. Most developers will supremely over engineer this

* API documentation. In a world where the average developer struggles to write an email actually describing inputs, purpose, and outputs clear enough for a stranger to follow can be quite the impossibility

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That is taken from a recent comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42157595

1 comments

I got a job ... true devops culture ... where I use Splunk etc. as much as I use git, I finally grok P99 and aggegrations and I don't hate it. It has been a mind opener and it is great to be data driven.

As an aside I think where I have seen bad performance it has been mostly architectural choices over O(N) stuff. These take a lot of organizational will power to fix properly as it costs money, time and egos.

When I interviewed at Facebook they asked me about O(N) performance of something. It felt like I was talking to a small child pretending to be smart. Don’t guess. If they aren’t willing to measure two things then compare those numbers performance is completely irrelevant. When that is impossible to understand it’s time to abandon the conversation and walk away.