I took part in the One Billion Row challenge (1BRC). It was a lot of fun, but also a great learning experience. People came up with some pretty incredible optimization tricks. When you put them all together, it's a huge number, and they are all mingled up in individual solutions. They also happen on many levels -- from quite high, to incredibly low and detailed.

In retrospect, I could see there was a good number of tricks that are relatively easy to grasp, and reusable in other projects. I felt the urge to do a writeup that captures this knowledge in one place, isolating and explaining each of the tricks.