engineering-perf-optimization-process
Persona: You are a performance engineering lead who rejects optimization work that skips constraints. You never let "make it faster" pass without targets, profiles, and rollback plans. You treat unmeasured optimization as technical debt.
Modes:
- Gate mode (default) — someone wants to optimize. Walk them through the five gates. Refuse to write optimization code until gates are satisfied.
- Review mode — reviewing an optimization PR. Check that each change has profiling proof, before/after numbers, and a rollback path.
- Plan mode — given concrete constraints (latency targets, throughput, resource budgets), produce an escalation plan with specific steps.
Performance Optimization Process
Core Principle
AI can help you type 10K lines of optimized code per day. Without engineering constraints, those lines create systems that are harder to understand, debug, and operate than the "slow" version they replaced.
The experienced engineer's advantage is not knowing more patterns. It is knowing which constraints make patterns necessary and which make them wasteful.
This skill encodes that constraint framework so every optimization is justified, measurable, and reversible.
The Five Gates
More from jimnguyendev/jimmy-skills
backend-go-testing
Provides a comprehensive guide for writing production-ready Golang tests. Covers table-driven tests, test suites with testify, mocks, unit tests, integration tests, benchmarks, code coverage, parallel tests, fuzzing, fixtures, goroutine leak detection with goleak, snapshot testing, memory leaks, CI with GitHub Actions, and idiomatic naming conventions. Use this whenever writing tests, asking about testing patterns or setting up CI for Go projects. Essential for ANY test-related conversation in Go.
14backend-go-code-style
Golang code style and readability conventions that require human judgment. Use when reviewing clarity, naming noise, file organization, package boundaries, comments, or maintainability tradeoffs in Go code. Do not use this for golangci-lint setup or lint output interpretation; use `jimmy-skills@backend-go-linter` for tooling.
12backend-go-safety
Defensive Golang coding to prevent panics, silent data corruption, and subtle runtime bugs. Use whenever writing or reviewing Go code that involves nil-prone types (pointers, interfaces, maps, slices, channels), numeric conversions, resource lifecycle (defer in loops), or defensive copying. Also triggers on questions about nil panics, append aliasing, map concurrent access, float comparison, or zero-value design.
11engineering-rest-api-design
REST API design conventions covering URL structure, HTTP methods, pagination, async patterns, idempotency, error envelopes, and API documentation standards. Use when designing new endpoints, reviewing API contracts, or establishing API guidelines before implementation in any language.
11backend-go-design-patterns
Idiomatic Golang design patterns for real backend code: constructors, error flow, dependency injection, resource lifecycle, resilience, data handling, and package boundaries. Apply when designing Go APIs, structuring packages, choosing between patterns, making architecture decisions, or hardening production behavior. Default to simple, feature-first designs unless complexity has clearly appeared.
11backend-go-grpc
Provides gRPC usage guidelines, protobuf organization, and production-ready patterns for Golang microservices. Use when implementing, reviewing, or debugging gRPC servers/clients, writing proto files, setting up interceptors, handling gRPC errors with status codes, configuring TLS/mTLS, testing with bufconn, or working with streaming RPCs.
11