Efficiency? Yes, but don’t put the cart before the horse

Dan North brought some of the ideas of efficiency we’ve been hearing about into focus during an interview with the fellas from .NET Rocks, Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell. Bringing the discussion straight home to the developer world, he noted that efficiency is indeed the right thing to think about, once you’ve realized effectiveness.

Dan made a nice distinction between efficiency, meaning using fewer resources for a given result versus effectiveness, which is about getting results – and getting the ones you want.  After all, optimizing is great when we’re optimizing the right thing.  Effectiveness is like design, making the system do the right thing.  Efficiency is about performance.  So be effective first, and once that works right (enough) then start to optimize it.   Or in .Net Rocks speak: just be awesome!