I remember one fun time between jobs, that I stayed up till 4 or 5 am optimizing something. It always felt like I was making progress and about to beat the original implementation
Unfortunately I had to give up when I was still 10 times slower than the reference lol
Same here, last time I was between jobs I optimized my defunct startup's database from ~50K TPS to nearly 5M TPS (no durability, if you're wondering), and that was unbelievably rewarding.
Unfortunately I had to give up when I was still 10 times slower than the reference lol