REAL WORLD EXAMPLE.

The following is an excerpt of an email from a former student who completed
his B.S. degree in spring 2013.  This student was not someone who made A's in
all classes, but was a student who was very inquisitive and thought deeply
about algorithm analysis.
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FORMER STUDENT EXPERIENCE

One thing that I think you would appreciate is that I'm constantly thinking
about time cost when writing new code/rewriting old code. The application
we're working on is a fairly young application that was bought from an
outsourced company, it's a management system for XXXX medical
practices-- originally built for a single practice. I came on right as they
were moving it to multi-client support, with it's main selling point being
that it streamlines the medical billing process.

The part you'd appreciate-- our billing process ran on a poorly designed queue
system that, with 23 very large practices using it now, would take sometimes
2-3 days to complete a cycle.

I took a week to re-write the queue system, and it passed testing/QA, went
into production, and the system takes an average of 30 seconds per cycle now,
even under heavy traffic.
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