Classic computer architecture experiment: Iterate over 100,000 integers and conditionally sum elements > 128. If the array is unsorted, the CPU's branch predictor misses 50% of the time, stalling the instruction pipeline. If the array is sorted, branch prediction accuracy is ~99%, and execution runs 6x faster. Understanding hardware mechanics makes you a dramatically better programmer.

In premier engineering institutes, you are surrounded by prodigies: Someone is a grandmaster on Codeforces, someone raised $50k for their startup, someone has two Nature papers. If you measure your self-worth against someone else's highlight reel, you will be miserable for 4 years. Compete only with where you were last semester.

Question: 'Estimate the number of cups of tea consumed daily on your university campus.' 1. State clarifying assumptions (campus student population = 6,000; hosteler vs day scholar split = 80/20). 2. Segment by user personas (non-tea drinkers = 30%, light drinkers = 1 cup/day, heavy exam grinders = 3 cups/day). 3. Add faculty and canteen footfall. 4. Sanity check with canteen vendor batch sizes. Interviewers care about structured logic, not the exact number.

Binary search trees have deep heights (O(log2 N)), meaning every lookup requires 15-20 disk I/O operations. B+ Trees have a high fan-out (each node holds hundreds of keys), keeping tree height at 3-4 even for millions of records. Plus, all leaf nodes are linked in a doubly linked list, making range queries (`WHERE age BETWEEN 20 AND 30`) blistering fast.

We were paying $18/month for an idle t3.micro EC2 instance just to run a lightweight campus dining API that only receives traffic at lunch and dinner. Porting to Cloudflare Workers (V8 isolates at edge) reduced cold starts to 0ms, eliminated server maintenance, and stayed comfortably within the 100,000 free daily request tier. Serverless edge is perfect for university projects.