The fine art of fast development

David Gilbertson
26 min readMay 5, 2019

This is an ironically long article, so in the interests of time I have written a short version for each section. If you’re in a skimming mood, you should be able to power through it in under 100 seconds (depending on your reading and scrolling skills).

If you’re not a developer but responsible for the performance of developers, you might want to skip way way down to “The upside down” section.

Go!

Photo by Saffu on Unsplash

A long meandering intro

When I speak to people about fast development (and I do, often) some people display a peculiar desire to translate the concept of fast into fast initially, but in a shortsighted way, so actually, slow.

It’s tempting to attribute this tendency to NND (Negative Nelly Disorder), but I think it goes deeper than that, and further back; I blame the famous fable of The Tortoise and the Hare.

This is a story in which an erratic rabbit and a tortoise with a purpose battle it out until a conclusion is reached:

Slow and steady wins the race

This is a reassuring message for (slow) children, but I propose the introduction of a new element to this fable, and I humbly present it to you now: The Tortoise, the Hare, and the Herd of Buffalo.

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