https://lemire.me/blog/2025/12/05/why-speed-matters/ Skip to content Daniel Lemire's blog Daniel Lemire is a software performance expert. He ranks among the top 2% of scientists globally (Stanford/Elsevier 2024) and is one of GitHub's top 1000 most followed developers. Menu and widgets * My home page * GitHub profile Your business needs help? Get in touch, I offer private talks, training, consulting and I do sponsored open-source projects. Support my work! I do not accept any advertisement. However, you can you can sponsor my open-source work on GitHub. Daniel Lemire started this blog in 2004. It contains 2,334 posts and 16,086 approved comments. Daniel Lemire's blog ranks among the top 50 most popular blogs on Hacker News, a leading tech news aggregation platform. Join over 12,500 email subscribers: [ ][Go!] You can follow this blog on telegram. Follow me on GitHub: Follow me on X: Follow @lemire Search for: [ ] [Search] Recent Posts * Why speed matters * We see something that works, and then we understand it * Why don't we get more scientific breakthroughs? * How fast can browsers process base64 data? * Antifragile Programming and Why AI Won't Steal Your Job Recent Comments * Christopher Smith on Why speed matters * Christopher Smith on Why speed matters * Daniel Lemire on Why speed matters * Conan on Why speed matters * Conor on Why speed matters Pages * A short history of technology * About me * Book recommendations * Cognitive biases * Interviews and talks * My bets * My favorite articles * My favorite quotes * My rules * Newsletter * Predictions * Privacy Policy * Recommended video games * Terms of use * Write good papers Archives Archives [Select Month ] Boring stuff * Log in * Entries feed * Comments feed * WordPress.org [Capture-decran-le-2025-12-06-a-14] Why speed matters The one constant that I have observed in my professional life is that people underestimate the need to move fast. Of course, doing good work takes time. I once spent six months writing a URL parser. But the fact that it took so long is not a feature, it is not a positive, it is a negative. If everything is slow-moving around you, it is likely not going to be good. To fully make use of your brain, you need to move as close as possible to the speed of your thought. If I give you two PhD students, one who completed their thesis in two years and one who took eight years... you can be almost certain that the two-year thesis will be much better. Moving fast does not mean that you complete your projects quickly. Projects have many parts, and getting everything right may take a long time. Nevertheless, you should move as fast as you can. For multiple reasons: 1. A common mistake is to spend a lot of time--too much time--on a component of your project that does not matter. I once spent a lot of time building a podcast-like version of a course... only to find out later that students had no interest in the podcast format. 2. You learn by making mistakes. The faster you make mistakes, the faster you learn. 3. Your work degrades, becomes less relevant with time. And if you work slowly, you will be more likely to stick with your slightly obsolete work. You know that professor who spent seven years preparing lecture notes twenty years ago? He is not going to throw them away and start again, as that would be a new seven-year project. So he will keep teaching using aging lecture notes until he retires and someone finally updates the course. What if you are doing open-heart surgery? Don't you want someone who spends days preparing and who works slowly? No. You almost surely want the surgeon who does many, many open-heart surgeries. They are very likely to be the best one. Now stop being so slow. Move! Daniel Lemire, "Why speed matters," in Daniel Lemire's blog, December 5, 2025, https://lemire.me/blog/2025/12/05/why-speed-matters/. [BibTeX] Published by [a0c6c3] Daniel Lemire A computer science professor at the University of Quebec (TELUQ). View all posts by Daniel Lemire Posted on December 5, 2025December 6, 2025Author Daniel Lemire Categories 6 thoughts on "Why speed matters" 1. [894cc7] Patrick says: December 6, 2025 at 5:29 pm Agree - but I would say that one needs to be aware of the right steps: Moving fast does not always mean that something must be quickly published. Good things may need time to be ready for publication - but they always need constant and early feedback and reflection. This is what many people misunderstand about ,,moving fast". Reply 2. [a4fad0] Conor says: December 6, 2025 at 7:39 pm It sounds to me like it's less "moving fast" and more "shrink the feedback loop". "Move fast" may be misconstrued by management/ product level people in a negative sense. Reply 3. [7687ef] Conan says: December 6, 2025 at 8:18 pm I definitely don't want a heart surgeon who moves fast and makes mistakes. The speed of doing a task is directly related to the consequences of getting it wrong. You don't bang out code as fast as you can when the safe control of the car depends on near 100% reliability. Frankly I think there's too much rushing for no good reason. Why are we forced to be in a hurry? Answer slowly. After adequate consideration. Our haste, in our economics is the whole reason the planet is (for human viability) descending into such shit. Reply 1. [a0c6c3] Daniel Lemire says: December 6, 2025 at 8:34 pm Increasing operative time was associated with increased odds of complications and, therefore, it appears that speed may matter Jackson, T. D., Wannares, J. J., Lancaster, R. T., Rattner, D. W., & Hutter, M. M. (2011). Does speed matter? The impact of operative time on outcome in laparoscopic surgery. Surgical endoscopy, 25(7), 2288-2295. Reply 4. [768568] Christopher Smith says: December 6, 2025 at 9:56 pm I think your graphic at the topic is truncated. Reply 1. [768568] Christopher Smith says: December 6, 2025 at 9:57 pm Sorry. My bad. It was my browser. Reply Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] Comment * [ ] Name * [ ] Email * [ ] Website [ ] [ ] Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. [Post Comment] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] D[ ] You can also subscribe by email to this blog (non commercial, no ads, weekly email) If you want to post code, consider formatting it with a tool like tohtml. Post navigation Previous Previous post: We see something that works, and then we understand it Terms of use Proudly powered by WordPress