Calling the achievement "pursuing of excellence needs no justification," Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson announced Tuesday that he had spent 900 hours reducing the boot time of his Omarchy Linux setup from 1.2 seconds to 0.8 seconds, a gain he expects to recoup in full sometime around the year 11,000.
"Most people would look at 0.4 seconds and see nothing," Hansson wrote in a 4,000-word blog post titled "The Last 400 Milliseconds," which took readers an average of 18 minutes to finish. "I see 0.4 seconds."
According to a break-even spreadsheet Hansson published alongside the post, the 3.24 million seconds he invested will be repaid after roughly 8.1 million boots, assuming he restarts his machine 2.5 times a day, every day, for the next 8,874 years. The spreadsheet does not account for the 140 hours Hansson spent building the spreadsheet.
Sources close to Hansson confirmed he has since begun rebooting his laptop between meetings, during meals and occasionally mid-sentence, in an effort to pull the break-even date into the current millennium.
"He's up to 300 reboots a day, which gets it down to roughly 2100," said 37signals engineer Mikkel Sørensen. "Unfortunately, each reboot also requires him to post about it, and the posts take about 40 minutes."
At press time, Hansson had announced plans to spend the next 2,000 hours rewriting the spreadsheet in Rails, which he said would make it load 0.2 seconds faster.
