Fast is better than slow

Summary

May 23, 2026 Don’t question why. Fast is better than slow. That’s just how it is. Your job is to take everything you can already do and do it faster. If you can embrace the idea that fast is intrinsically better than slow, you’re halfway home. If you can get an entire team of players to embrace that idea, you’re going to win a lot of games. All other things being equal, if I can get the ball from Point A to Point B with one touch, it is better than getting it there in two touches. Why? Because one touch is faster than two touches, and fast is better than slow. — Dan Blank, Soccer IQ About 10 years ago, I realized all the best programmers I had worked with had something in common: they were fast. By that I mean that they moved quickly: we’d discuss a problem and an hour or two later they’d already have a patch ready or a prototype to show off. It took me a while, but eventually I realized: they weren’t fast because they were great programmers, they were great programmers because they were fast. Think about it — if you’re fast, you get data more quickly. That helps you make better decisions, sooner. It also means you learn faster, and over longer periods it means you learn more. Being fast also means you can try out multiple approaches to a problem and pick the best one. A lot of people push back on this because it sounds like hustle culture. But there are lots of ways to move faster that don’t involve working long hours. Jamie Brandon has written a pair of excellent posts on this: Speed matters and Moving faster. You should go and read those if you haven’t already. I have a few suggestions of my own — things that are a bit more about the messy reality of working as a software engineer than they are about coding per se. And I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that, unlike Jamie, they took me more than a decade to learn. Don’t delay. This is a big one. I’ve worked with many people who seem to move slowly out of habit. They learn about a problem at 4pm, and decide to tack...