If you're working on some feature that requires you to create many user accounts, here's a tip I find helpful. Use a service like Spaml that creates disposable email accounts just by going to the site.

Drupal allows valid email addresses as usernames. If you can reduce your user creation process to just those fields which accept as valid an email address, you can just go down the form, tab, ctrl+v, tab... and then hit 'Submit'.

In my experience, there are three different categories of site slowdown and delay:

• Imperceptible
• Perceptible
• Unusable

Other distinctions really don't matter so much. The user doesn't care whether the page load latency is 10 seconds or 15 seconds. They're just going to leave.

The progression of a delay is:

Imperceptible -> Perceptible -> Unusable

... that they seldom come true. And in the age of the forever web making bold but inevitably false predictions is eventually going to get fingers poked at you.

Almost a year ago now, podcasting jockey Chris Pirillo predicted that Drupal was dying because of a shortage of 'intelligent' developers.

I don't know if he's forgotten his economics lessons, but low supply means one of two things:

Every day, the forgot password? functionality on many different sites gets a workout. The symptom: people not being able to remember which of their 12 different usernames they used to register on a site. Reducing a user's memory load is an issue all too often ignored by developers. At the very least, it lets me pick the username I want if I can use the email address to log in.

... it costs me at least 15 minutes of productivity. Possibly more.

The trouble is, getting into "the zone" is not easy. When you try to measure it, it looks like it takes an average of 15 minutes to start working at maximum productivity.
[...]
The other trouble is that it's so easy to get knocked out of the zone. Noise, phone calls, going out for lunch, having to drive 5 minutes to Starbucks for coffee, and interruptions by coworkers -- ESPECIALLY interruptions by coworkers -- all knock you out of the zone. If you take a 1 minute interruption by a coworker asking you a question, and this knocks out your concentration enough that it takes you half an hour to get productive again, your overall productivity is in serious trouble.

Some people wonder why I hate the phone. well, that's why. It's so easy to call people, and very hard to ignore. And before anybody says anything, no it's not that easy to remember to turn down/off the ringer before you get into the zone. Sometimes that just happens: the rest of the world be damned.