Always Measure One Level Deeper
This is a great paper (CACM 2018) by John Ousterhout. Ousterhout is well known for his work on log-structured file system, tcl/tk, Raft, and magic VLSI CAD. His book on Philosophy of Software Design is great, and he has a lot of wisdom about life in general that he shares in his Stanford CS classes. The paper is written very well, so I lift up paragraphs verbatim from it to summarize its main points. There are many war stories in the text. Please do read it, because they are fascinating, and likely you can see how they can apply to your work, and save you from making a mistake. At the end, I chime in with my reflections and link to other relevant work. Key Insights In academic research a thorough performance evaluation is considered essential for many publications to prove the value of a new idea. In industry, performance evaluation is necessary to maintain a high level of performance across the lifetime of a product. A good performance evaluation provides a deep understanding of