The overarching goal when writing code is to make it easy to read and to understand. However, on rare occasions, you have a heavily used component that could use a boost of performance, and you could use some tricks to make it faster. This talk collects a set of outrageous stunts and maybe-controversial defying acts I have seen and sometimes made in production, that can give the Erlang Virtual Machine that extra speed or memory edge on different scenarios. Warning! Don't copy-paste these at home like if they came straight from Stack Overflow. With great power comes great responsibility.