Yoda Response: Challenged the conventional way of doing things, I did, in a project involving recursive functions. Faced with a performance issue in calculating factorials, I was. Conventional approach, slow it was, due to repeated calculations. Driven by the need for efficiency, I explored caching, I did. Created a custom cache, I did, by passing a hash map as an additional parameter to store previously computed values. Solved the recursion and speed issues, it did. The result, a significant improvement in performance, it was. From this, learned the importance of thinking outside the box and continuously seeking better solutions, I did.