async programming
Building is feeling more and more like starcraft. Bouncing between actions that have timers - generate this illustration for the landing page, while you wait kick off this feature set, open a new tab and start fixing the padding and visibility on this other part of the page.
Eking out timing and efficiency at every step creates a very different mode of operation than sitting in the code at a very low level. It's not better, and it may not be worse. Time will tell.