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I agree with the overall sentiment of this post but I'm not sure about this:

> A codebase that is easy to maintain becomes easier to optimize.

I think optimization and maintainability are often at odds. The only example which comes to mind is loop unrolling, increases performance, decreases maintainability.

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I assume that the author means, when it is easy to change something in the code (i.e. without fear because you have a very good test automation), then it is easy to apply changes like performance optimizations.

Things like loop unrolling is probably something I wouldnt do by hand on the source code, I would probably write a script that transforms the code automatically, so the original source code stays readable.

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