The main difference between a developer and an engineer is not just the code they write. It's how they think about building a system. How they optimize. How they use resources.
I learned this from a real project.
I had to read 10,000 JSON requests and write them into a file. Simple enough. I wrote the program the way I always did the developer way. Read all 10,000 requests, store everything in memory, then write to the file. Done.
When I tested it, my memory usage was much higher than normal. Way higher than it should have been.
The developer in me would have just moved on. It works, right? But something made me stop and ask why is this consuming so much memory?
