But a lot is opportunity. Like, I had the opportunity to work on an old PHP backend, 500ms - 1 second response times (thanks in part to it writing everything to a giant XML string which was then parsed and converted to a JSON blob before being sent back over the line). Simply rewriting it in naive / best practices Go changed response times to 10 ms. In hindsight the project was far too big to rewrite on my own and I should have spent six months to a year trying to optimize and refactor it, but, hindsight.
Although that's also often an invitation for hallucinations so you have to be even more careful than usual.
I've "invented" all sorts of old patents, all sorts of algorithms, including the PID algorithm. I think it helped form a very practically useful "intuition".
But, I've noticed that some people are passionately against this type of self exploration.
uncatchable, so I won't even try.
:)
no worries.
it's "you [don't] know" all the way down.
It's the difference between hearing a lecture from a "bad" professor in Uni and watching a lecture video by Feynman, where he tries to get rid of scientific terms, when explaining things in simple terms to the public.
As long as you get a definition for your terms, things are manageable.
One way to often arrive at it is to just draw some graphs, on paper/whiteboard, and manually step through examples, pointing with your finger/pen, drawing changes, and sometimes drawing a table. You'll get a better idea of what has to happen, and what the opportunities are.
This sounds "Then draw the rest of the owl," but it can work, once you get immersed.
Then code it up. And when you spot a clever opportunity, and find the right language to document your solution, it can sound like a brilliant insight that you could just pull out of the air, because you are so knowledgeable and smart in general. When you actually had to work through that specific problem, to the point you understood it, like Feynman would want you to.
I think Feynman would tell us to work through problems. And that Feynman would really f-ing hate Leetcode performance art interviews (like he was dismayed when he found students who'd rote-memorize the things to say). Don't let Leetcode asshattery make you think you're "not good at" algorithms.
Yet, you ask someone "how do you build an efficient LFU" and get blank stares (I just LOVE the memcache solution of regions and probabilistic promotion/demotion).