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Coding Horror: The God Login

Updated: at 05:00 PM

A must read: Jeff Atwood researches and explains how to make your sign in and register process a smooth user experience

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror writes:

And one of the coolest things my college professor Mr. Pausch ever taught me was to ask this question:

What’s the God algorithm for this?

Well, when sorting a list, obviously God wouldn’t bother with a stupid Bubble Sort or Quick Sort or Shell Sort like us mere mortals, God would just immediately place the items in the correct order. Bam. One step. The ultimate lower bound on computation, O(1). Not just fixed time, either, but literally one instantaneous step, because you’re freakin’ God.

This kind of blew my mind at the time.

So when we set out to build a login dialog for Discourse, I went back to what I learned in my Algorithms class and asked myself:

How would God build this login dialog?

Read more from the source: blog.codinghorror.com