Compile times (especially when not using a distributed build system) are always nice to keep down. Outside of code structure, I ran across this little ditty to help speed up your local build times:
make -j n
The -j parameter in make tells the build system to use n processors while running targets. To find out how many processors your Linux system has (should run on a Mac too), run cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l.
