1. First and foremost: measure early, measure often. It's been said so often and it still needs repeating. In fact, the more you know about performance the easier it can be to fall into the trap of not measuring enough. Measuring will show exactly where you need to focus your efforts. It will also tell you without question whether your work has actually lead to an improvement, and to what degree.2. The easiest way to make things go faster is to do less work. Use a more efficient algorithm, refactor code to eliminate unnecessary operations, move repeated work outside of loops. There are many flavours, but very often the biggest performance boosts are gained by simply solving the same problem through fewer instructions.3. Understand the performance characteristics of your system. Is your application CPU bound, GPU compute bound, memory bound? If you don't know this you could make the code ten times as fast without gaining a single ms because the system is still stuck waiting for a memory transfer. On the flip side, if you know your system is busy waiting for memory, perhaps you can move computations to this spot to leverage this free work? This is particularly important in shader optimizations (latency hiding).4. Solve a different problem! You can very often optimize your program by redefining your problem. Perhaps you are using the optimal algorithm for the problem as defined. But what does the end user really need? Often there are very similar but much easier problems which are equivalent for all practical purposes. Sometimes because the complexity lies in special cases which can be avoided or because there's a cheap approximation which gives sufficient accuracy. This happens especially often in graphics programming where the end goal is often to give an impression that you've calculated something.

Things that eat CPU: iterations, string operations. Things that waste CPU: lock contentions in multi-threaded environments, wait states.

So when ex-Telltale Games designer and writer Sean Vanaman announced last month that the first game from Campo Santo, his new video game development studio, was "being both backed by and made in collaboration with the stupendous, stupidly-successful Mac utility software-cum-design studio slash app/t-shirt/engineering company Panic Inc. from Portland, Oregon," it wasn't expected, but it wasn't exactly surprising, either. It was, instead, the logical conclusion of years-long friendships and suddenly aligning desires.

"There's a weird confluence of things that have crisscrossed," he said. "One is that we're lucky in that Panic is the kind of company that has never been defined by a limited mission statement, or 'We're the network tool guys' or anything like that. I mean, we made a really popular mp3 player. Then we kind of fell into network tools and utilities, but we've always done goofy stuff like our icon changer and these shirts and all that other stuff. "I kind of love that we can build stuff, and the best reaction that we can get when we do a curveball like this is, 'That's totally weird, but also that totally makes sense for Panic.'"

"To me," Sasser said, "when you have actually good people who are more interested in making awesome things than obsessing over the business side of things or trying to squeeze every ounce of everything from everybody, then that stuff just goes easy. It's just fun. The feeling that you're left with is just excitement.