My Go at a ‘Richard Hendrickson’ Moment
So, I was thinking about that guy, Richard Hendrickson, from that TV show. You know, the awkward coder dude always trying to make his big compression thing work? It got me thinking about a time I tried to pull off something similar, well, kind of similar, in my own little project.
It wasn’t some world-changing algorithm, mind you. I was just trying to make this data processing script I wrote run way faster. It was taking ages, like, go-make-a-coffee-and-come-back ages. I got this idea, this ‘brilliant’ idea, late one night. I thought I could be clever, like Richard, and find some super smart shortcut to crunch the numbers.
So, I jumped right in. Didn’t really plan much, just started coding. Typical me. I spent hours tinkering, trying different ways to handle the data, rearranging loops, caching stuff here and there. It felt like I was wrestling with spaghetti code, my own spaghetti code, which is worse.
- First attempt: Made it slower. Seriously.
- Second attempt: Crashed the whole thing. Had to revert back.
- Third attempt: Okay, this looked promising. It seemed faster on my small test data.
I got pretty excited, thinking, “Yeah, nailed it!” Felt like I’d found the secret sauce. I even started explaining it to my dog, who just looked confused. Probably because I was talking nonsense.
Then came the real test. I ran it on the full dataset. And guess what? It was… marginally faster. Like, maybe 10% faster. All that effort, all those hours staring at the screen, for a measly 10%. It wasn’t the Pied Piper miracle I imagined. Not even close.
Turns out, the bottleneck wasn’t where I thought it was. My ‘clever’ solution was optimizing something that wasn’t the real problem. It was a classic case of overthinking, trying to be too smart instead of just profiling the damn thing properly from the start.
It was a humbling experience, really. You see these characters like Hendrickson pull off amazing tech feats, and you think maybe you can too. But reality is often just… fixing the obvious, boring stuff. No magic algorithm, just careful, step-by-step work. Still, it was kind of fun trying to be the hero coder for a bit, even if I just ended up making things slightly less slow.
