I can't recommend nand2tetris highly enough – it's a great crash course in computer architecture, operating systems, compilers, etc. but also it's just mega fun.
A big part of the joy came from making up my own extra credit side quests: implementing a compile-to-WASM emulator for the hack machine, adding optimisations to the compiler to produce smaller and/or faster programs, etc.
I disagree, I think the 70% is right, and matches what you still describe as a 1.7x speed increase.
If it originally took 4 seconds and now takes 2, I'd call that a 100% speed increase, i.e. twice as fast.
@hcm: Would have loved to see the 'after' flamegraph just for comparison purposes! I'm still trying to get used to groking flamegraphs when optimizing. They're a somewhat new tool, IMO.
(Author here) I don't see that in Chrome so had no idea that was happening – thanks for pointing it out! I'm not a fan of coding ligatures so I just pushed a change to turn it off.
I built https://grephub.com for that. It doesn’t maintain an index so it’s not super snappy, but it’s good enough / better than you’d expect in many cases!
Great article. We've just moved a large portion of our async jobs over from Resque to Que because of the huge benefits you get from transactional enqueuing and processing. Performance seems good so far, and if it really becomes an issue, running two queuing systems side by side (one transactional, one high-throughput) seems viable.
A big part of the joy came from making up my own extra credit side quests: implementing a compile-to-WASM emulator for the hack machine, adding optimisations to the compiler to produce smaller and/or faster programs, etc.