Ask HN: How can I learn about performance optimization?

A) kind of sounds like a toxic work environment

B) this is a bad way to reason about performance without knowing more. Is this actually a bottleneck? Would the heroic effort be better spent saving minutes elsewhere where its easy to save time instead of saving seconds during boot where its hard to save time and users encounter relatively rarely? Optimizing boot might be the right call but it also might not be.

Anything can be optimized. The real trick is to optimize your optimization so you optimize the right thing to get the most improvement possible as you are almost always limited by the amount of time you can spend optimizing so you can't do it all. Picking a component at random is a terrible way of doing optimization.

1) Try to understand well the architecture of your company (who is who, who decides what changes are made to computers, how they decide that, what metrics do they use, what tests and benchmarks are passed before changes, etc)

2) Try to understand your place in such architecture. Am I responsible from the overall performance? or only the performance of certain components? am I responsible about the latency of the network or the latency of the database, or both etc. Make a clear scope. This will help you to focus on which metrics do you need to follow.

3) Try to understand the company procedures. Can I refuse a change that comes from the product or marketing team? can I refuse a change that comes from developers? can I refuse a change that comes from the platform team? how much time do I have to analyze such changes before they reach production, how can I request the rollback of a unsupervised change, where can I check the performance impact of each change made on production in the past? etc

4) Try to understand what the CEO and CTO, your team and the rest of teams should expect from you. Are there any SLA o SLO for your position related to the overall performance?

5) Make clear how you are informed of ongoing changes and roadmaps? Should I spend all the week in the performance of a component that is going to be deprecated in the next sprint? etc

6) Ask doubts and questions to your team mates, or department head. They may teach you about the company workflows, past issues, past solutions, corner cases, blockers, resources, plans and guidelines.

In short... look for reading/watching material, but don't forget to look at your company too, you will find things to learn there too, and maybe things that need to change if they are important enough; or need to be clarified that they are not important enough to change, to defend your work on future performance issues, related to those things that weren't changed.

This is a good book. It covers most common concepts and techniques in a fairly accessible way. At they end it also shows builds up a highly optimized version of some algorithms and data structures and does explains every optimization.