Things like don’t shake a baby (babies love to be bounced and rocked, which are honestly just gentle shaking, but even moderately vigorous shaking can seriously injure or kill an infant and you should never shake a baby in anger or anything like that) or don’t take anything with you when exiting a building when a fire alarm goes off (don’t go looking for things, but you should still put your coat on if it’s next to you and it’s cold out). What other common maxims are generally good to follow, but over exaggerated? Bonus points if it’s only a well known saying because our instinct is to do the thing, like with rocking babies.
(Please don’t think I’m telling you to shake babies or look for and carry huge stacks of files out of a burning building)
There’s an old saying in software development: The only thing worse than no optimization is premature optimization.
It can be a true statement (if a bit hyperbolic), but far too many people seem to think it means “don’t worry about performance until the end.”
You should pay attention to code optimization throughout development and take time to solve rough spots periodically. You just have to know that some optimization strategies can become tech dept by gumming up on-going development.
I knew some development strategies can become costly in the long term but I didn’t know they’d form whole departments /s