Follow me down the optimization rabbit hole

Recently I've been talking with potential clients and have needed to explain in detail what it is that I do. My title and resume don't do a great job of conveying that information, so I thought it would be useful to collect my ideas here. Lately, the majority of my time is spent making other people's code run faster, but I also work with bits, bytes, pixels and embedded devices. The following are anecdotes from working with various clients. For security reasons, specific project details may be omitted. Back End / Server A while ago, I cold-called a company with a proposition. They run a "software as a service" that processes tons of images for clients using their own server machines. I asked if they were using open source software to run their business and if they were satisfied with the performance. It turns out that I caught them at a good time because they were having performance problems and were about to purchase more servers to handle their growing list...

Warning I will be naming and shaming a specific tech company, but most companies are guilty of the same thing. Scenario You define a standard used in the software industry and provide the reference code to make use of it. The standard is complex enough that developers don't want to re-invent the wheel by writing their own implementations. The reference code is incorporated into commercial products and used by millions (billions?) of people around the world. There is a slight problem - the reference code isn't properly optimized, so all of your users are wasting additional time+energy working with the data you've standardized. The Specifics The subject of this blog post is the OpenEXR image file standard created by Industrial Light & Magic . I'm not directly involved in working with these images, but my client is and I saw an opportunity to improve their productivity by optimizing access to them. There's nothing particularly wrong with the reference impl...