Chapter 9
Think Outside the Box

Our ability to focus, as software engineers, makes us vulnerable to the tunnel vision syndrome. What that means when it comes to optimization is that when our Ruby program is slow, we tend to concentrate only on Ruby code optimization. But there are other ways to make our Ruby program faster, often resulting in a greater improvement than the obvious approach of looking for ways to optimize that Ruby code.

To find these other ways we have to step out of the box and look at how our program runs in the real world, what other software it uses, and where it’s deployed. Our program will become faster if we find a better way to run it by optimizing all its dependencies and deployment infrastructure.

How exactly do we do that? I’ll show you a couple of examples here in this chapter. But, unlike in the rest of my book, I can neither give you a complete solution nor outline the steps to be taken. There are simply too many ways to run the Ruby code, too many external tools it may use, and too many deployment platforms. So look at the material in this chapter as a source of inspiration for your own thinking outside the box, not as a complete guide.