The journey of developing Haydex, a hyper-fast filtering system for querying massive datasets, highlights the evolution from a failed initial attempt to a successful, high-performance solution achieved within a month. Initially plagued by inefficiencies and bottlenecks in its V0 design, which suffered from naive execution and high I/O demands, the team pivoted to a V1 approach that employed field-scoped filters for more efficient data handling. This involved a distributed redesign that improved indexing speed by 6x and reached a peak throughput of 673 billion rows per second. The process was a daunting, iterative challenge involving extensive profiling and optimization to address CPU and memory usage, resulting in transformative performance improvements for customers dealing with trillion-row datasets. The project underscores the importance of adapting to real-world constraints, utilizing a profiler for optimization, and embracing a relentless pursuit of performance improvements in distributed systems engineering.