An important point for a good developer is that you can think forward. He doesn't develop a solution just for the current requirements. He also spend some time (of course no 5 day of research for a simple case) to find the best way to ensure that the application will runs as long as possible without being optimized.
As a stupid example what I mean: You have 3 strings which are sorted and you have to find the index of a certain string. So you can simply loop through the list and this solution will - in this particular case - be as good as any other algorithm. But a good developer will use a proper search algorithm which is fast for a size of 3, but also fast for a size of 3000 items.
You never know, how the requirements will change, but wherever it is possible you have it in mind and choose a good solution for as much as possible situations.
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