The fun Reddit made me stumble upon this interesting thread on the great Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/487258/plain-english-explanation-of-big-o/487278#answer-487278 . Yes, I’m aware of the geeky path that lead to a nerdy result.
After almost 2 years of calculus, algebra and geometry I was pretty fed up with more maths, so this theory looked pretty boring to me in college. The lack of lack of practical examples was turning me off. These days, while going deeper in deeper in software development and scalability problems, I see the application of such theories and that brings me joy.
For example Google App Engine’s non-relational database changes the way a web developer should think about storing info. No more tables and normalization, it’s all objects and properties. I’m anxious to see the moment when one of our GAE apps will be saved by an optimization resulted from complexity analysis.
