Tuesday, 13 May 2008

The factor 2 principle

All ideas that intend to improve something less than 2 times are unambitious.

3 comments:

Jan Derk said...

Or realistic.

Anonymous said...

While I generally agree, it does not always mean you need to be more ambitious.

Sometimes you just want/need to prepare the code for a future far more ambitious change. Legacy code...ahem

Lars D said...

The principle doesn't apply everywhere, but I generally use it about memory usage, CPU usage and performance. A change that is smaller than 2 is usually inflated away easily by other changes, and improvements larger than 2 are usually possible by making the right inventions.