typography pillow DONE!

Here it is! The fabulous typography pillow is ready!

I was lazy, I was reluctant, I did nothing, I wandered back and forth among lots of half-baked ideas...

And then I rolled up my sleeves and whipped it up in a few days! YAY!

Check out the rest of the completed creations (and creations in progress) here

If you don't know the saying, you are probably not a computer programmer. 

Read my explanation at the bottom of this post.

What I love about this pillow:

• The saying is cute.
• I love how professional and precise the text looks.
• I like the colorful band around the pillow.
• I like that the pillow has a somewhat unique shape, rather than with the "pointy corners".
• I love the running stitch around the letters

What I've learned and would have liked to improve:

• The saying looks a bit harsh, next time I'll find something cuter.
• I would like to stencil the letters on using freezer paper and fabric paint rather than write them using a fabric marker
• I would like it to be more colorful - the colorful band doesn't really show when looking at the pillow from the front.
• I'd like to try other, happier, colors of fabric paint / marker.
• I'd like to have a more improvised / funky / free design
• The inside filling is rather lumpy... Maybe I'll buy a new one.

"premature optimization is the root of all evil"

Here's my explanation about what this saying means:

As a programmer, you face technical / design / engineering problems that you need to solve. 

Many times, the solution is simple, but the simple solution is sometimes costly in terms of performance, memory consumption, etc.

So sometimes the programmer says "hey, I have a complex solution for the problem, that is less costly" (for example: runs twice as fast, or uses less memory).

This is called optimization: taking a solution that works and tweaking it to make it better.

Why is the case I described above called premature optimization? Because the penalty of the complex solution (hard to implement, maintain, and debug) many times outweigh the benefits. Sometimes you have code that takes an hour to run, and you improved a tiny part of it, that used to run one second, and now runs half a second. You wasted time achieving something negligible, while complicating the code and made everyone hate you.

In short, always go for the simple solution. In the end, test the system's performance, find the bottlenecks, and carefully optimize those areas only.