Expert Python Programming - Third Edition

Making it work first

A very common mistake that 's made by many developers is optimizing the code continuously from the very beginning. This is often a pointless and wasteful endeavor because the real bottlenecks are often located where you would have never thought they would be.

Even a seemingly simple application is usually composed of very complex interactions, and it is often impossible to guess how well it will behave until it is actually used by its users in the real production environment.

Of course, this is not a reason to write every function and algorithm with total negligence of performance problems and solve every problem by brute forcing it. Some performance hot spots of your application may be obvious from the very beginning, ...