I hear lot of people talking about waist lines, body mass index etc. This has become the most common topic in most social gatherings. One common thing I noticed in all these conversations, is that, everyone wants to lose 5 pounds in the shortest possible time. 5 lbs before a wedding, 10 pounds for the summer to look good on the beach. That too with ease! Whichever gym or coach promises that, they go and try out that. In 3 months, most realize that it is neither fast, nor easy.

I hear a similar topic whenever I meet Develop teams that have online e-commerce portals and SaaS apps. Usually, the conversation goes “I want to improve my app speed to respond within 5 seconds; currently it takes 9 seconds. A few people had said that it required redesign and that extended the timeline by 3 months for the next release. What a waste of time and money! Again, here also, I see the same urgency to make the apps faster, with ease.

Can that be done in a day - increasing the speed or reducing the waistline? Yes, it can! But it's a process. You do it one day at a time, the result measured daily, weekly and monthly. The effort goes in daily but the results are evident weekly and monthly. You must work out at least for 15 minutes every day. That habit has to set in first. The moment this is achieved for a week, you will see drastic improvement in your body and mind.

Same holds true in application performance. Measuring the performance must be done as the first step. Whether it is a dev box or test box or production box, you must monitor and measure. If you have the performance stats for the peak hour, you can arrive at so many action items to fine tune. This is the basic work out. This is the starting point.

What about burning those extra calories? This is where you must do a variety of exercises. Just walking alone cannot help. It may lead to boredom. Try weights for 5 minutes, stairs for 5 minutes, rowing for 5 minutes and so on. You will not feel the boredom and without realizing you will be burning more calories.

From 15 minutes work out, you will be doing 45 minutes work out, with ease. When it comes to apps, you must measure performance from user's angle, ops angle and pre-production angle. Repeat this for every user transaction in the app. You will find those peculiar bottlenecks that cause user frustration. Without these, it is very tough to tune apps quickly

The mantra is: Start simple, measure performance from users, ops and pre-production angles, and most importantly, keep repeating this.

One must exercise regularly, with variety. That is the secret!!