The mathematician that designed the model I referred to at the end ended up passing it on to me. I've now built something of an empire of people and projects using it, "just" by making better tools to manage its inputs, outputs, visualisation and automation.

I was stupidly excited to recently do more work on that same model - I took one of its internal datastructures and turned it from a simple queue into a priority queue using a couple different queueing metrics. In both cases, I had run cases out to a scale where I was able to actually show going from O(1) to O(log(n)) performance - but got beautiful wins because the fastest work is work you never have to do.

Not often I can empirically show traditional CS101 stuff in a real-world chart.