Optimization stories that keep Clojure code idiomatic: profile, isolate, fix, then re-measure.
Performance work is easiest to learn through real stories: a symptom, a hypothesis, a measurement, a fix, and the “why it worked” explanation.
This section walks through case studies that a Java engineer will recognize: a slow endpoint dominated by allocation, a pipeline blocked on I/O, a hot loop suffering from reflection, and a system slowed by coordination overhead.
The emphasis is on keeping changes small and defensible in code review—performance improvements that make the system better without making the codebase harder to maintain.