Why your outdoorsy friend suddenly has a gummy bear power bank

Why your [ultra-light hiker] friend suddenly has [the world's lightest] power bank.

I remember Colin Fletcher, years ago, writing in The Complete Walker about trimming the borders off his paper maps to save weight, which seemed like an insane over-optimization to me. But then, I'm not an ultralight hiker.

I am impressed folks are getting their loads down to 10 pounds though.

Tangent: as a web performance consultant, I've sometimes used "shaving down half the toothbrush handle while carrying a bowling ball in your backpack" as a metaphor for misguided performance optimization efforts.

To turn it back around-- your entire codebase is on the hiker's back. They feel its aggregate weight with every step.

It's all literally in the hot path.

When bugs show up in the form of back pain, "pre-optimize everything" sounds like a sensible option to me.