Parsing large amounts of JSON sucks. Even on an iPhone 4.

Import times were upwards of five seconds, turning JSON into native collection objects and then mapping these to local Core Data entities. Just awful. Luckily, I work with people who are way, way smarter than I am. I asked hardcore Pythonista and Real Programmer Andre von Houck if he could make the server spit out Binary Plist files instead of JSON, saving me the parsing overhead.

A couple of days later, he’d written something from scratch to do this. Since I could skip the parsing, import times dropped by 2500ms. Andre is a badass.