Self-taught programmers: what made the idea of "time complexity" really *click* for you? 🧮

Was there a video, blog post, book chapter, etc. that really acted as an ah-ha moment? 💡

#Python #programming

I think I should clarify what I'm asking:

When did the practical relevance of time complexity really click for you?

Meaning, when did you realize that this style of "thinking in orders of magnitude" is helpful for avoiding N+1 problems or other unnecessary loops (or something even deeper if you've needed to care/think about n log n, log n, etc.)?

#Python #programming

@treyhunner The first time someone on my programming team suggested we move to a more complex SQL query to eliminate a nested query loop, which significantly reduced the number of records that needed to be fetched from the database and led to a significant decrease in processing time, back when I was a SQL query novice. Something on the order of 10 minutes vs. 1 hour!

@treyhunner @gkapfham -- hi again trey! (thanks greg for the boost) ... there should be a term when you re-find a colleague on mastodon whom you haven't heard from in years since you quit twitter

@pg @gkapfham hey Philip! 👋

There should be a term for that. 😆

Hope you've been well. Would love to catch up sometime.

@treyhunner @gkapfham cool i'll ping you offline sometime!

@treyhunner @pg sort of a small screed on how i have contextualized this in the past, i find that jr or non-cs backed colleagues have underexamined notions about how fast computers actually are, but this usually manifests in assuming slow perf is Normal and not the result of bad planning or design. i’ve started asking people if they think a late 90s pc could do something we perceive or assume being slow on modern hardware and try to tease apart if we think the web platform is truly that much more inefficient. https://turbotime.turboteam.xyz/notice/AfkN61GtqaJzaWhD7o