Low Hanging Fruit (aka obvious stuff)

[Robadob]

When you begin writing code, and the plan changes half way through it's easy for bottlenecks that weren't previously a problem to appear. These can be recognised and easily addressed, they mostly revolve around redundant repetition.

• Repeating the same operation to calculate a value every iteration of a loop (move the operation outside the loop so that it's performed once)
• Regularly calling a function that performs an expensive operation to return a predictable result (cache results, LRU cache decorator).
• Reading the same file from disk multiple times (read it once and cache it in memory).
• ??

[Robadob]

Worth using the applicable items from the COM4521 lecture 2b.

Call it first steps or similar.

[JostMigenda]

• Regularly calling a function that performs an expensive operation to return a predictable result (cache results, LRU cache decorator).

Yes—memoization was also on the list of things I considered adding (but didn’t get to for our first run). With [functools.cache](https://docs.python.org/3/library/functools.html#functools.cache), that’s just a 1 line change, so hopefully shouldn’t take up too much time? Factorial or Fibonacci could both make for a good demo.

[Robadob]

Similar to the short snippet about filter your data before processing not after, it feels too short/brief for people to take it in. Lack of a decent example stopped me adding this, functools cache could work though.