A number of years ago, I got a bit addicted to coding challenges on HackerRank. It was kind of intense, fun learning the algorithms, frustrating seeing my early attempts crash and burn but ultimately triumphant when I finally got the thing to run in under N number of seconds that was demanded.
Something that has always stuck with me from those days was how easy it would have been to settle if I hadn’t known it was possible. In real life, on each iteration, as I slowly improved the running time, I could have settled. But in a coding challenge, if the target was 4 seconds then I knew it was possible, and even though it seemed impossible after my initial attempts, I carried on. I carried on despite frustration and exasperation as my attempts continued to fail.
Another example of this was the 1 Billion Row Challenge. You could see other people’s results, so you knew you could do better.
In the real world it's so easy to settle. You write an algorithm, come up with an architecture, design a protocol and so on; it works and has reasonable performance, reasonable properties. In the real world sometimes that's enough and you move on. But sometimes perhaps it’s worth striving and not settling for your early ideas. What if, instead of accepting your design you ask yourself for something better, may be something out of left field? May be add a constraint that if you could pull off would be amazing. May be it requires some extra reading, like when I would dip into my various algorithms books for another way, another strategy.
It’s something I seriously think about whenever it comes to software design and implementation. It’s a sort of ongoing epiphany that surfaces anytime I need to design something - remember HackerRank. I ask, well that’s good but what if you had to come up with something better than this?