If you’ve ever hired a programmer, and you’re not a programmer yourself, you might have found yourself in an uncomfortable situation. They write the program or website for you, but it’s slow, has missing features, or has some weird problem.
When you ask the developer about it, they spout some technical buzzwords and tell you the problem is impossible to solve – it’s just a natural limit of the language or environment.
However, that’s usually not correct. Most of the times, the problem can be fixed.
Usually when I start working with a new client, it’s to fix a program that isn’t working well, or sometimes, not working at all.
So, I’m going to write up case studies for several of the problems I’ve encountered, and fixed, in these programs. These case studies won’t get too deep into the technical part of the solution, and there won’t be any (or, very little) source code to read. However, it will give you an idea of the sort of problems that can be easily fixed, once they are tracked down.
Most of the times, it took less than a day to make the changes needed to fix the problem. In several cases, I was able to increase the throughput of the program by more than ten times – without spending any money on faster computers.
These case studies will let you see that you don’t have to accept a program that is slow, or behaves strangely at times.