Hacker News Reader

I'd agree with this. My last couple of projects did have a couple of hacks that bordered on spaghetti code until they were sufficiently cleaned up.

3.5 Profile it to see whether or not it needs to be faster

If you profile it on a fast machine, your results might lie to you.

Or on a machine on a fast network, or SSD vs spinning-rust, or any number of varying factors.

It's less likely to break if it's manageable first.