You work in a large codebase and (surprise!) it has performance issues. Realistically, you can’t halt feature development to overhaul your core infrastructure. You also can’t expect a single person to tackle the growing heap of tech debt while everyone else plows ahead. So what can you do? Embrace premature optimizations! As it turns out, they might not be as premature as everyone thinks. Here are a few tricks to thinking like a performance engineer and some tips on convincing even the most stubborn of naysayers that a little forward thinking is the answer to their problems.