I grew up being a big fan of horror movies. I enjoyed them all; from big blockbuster movies, to unheard of indie flicks, and there's one type of scene all horror movies have in common: The young heroine manages to escape from the masked killer's dungeon, and breathlessly makes back to her car. After fidgeting with her keys for what seems like an eternity, she finally gets the door open. She's almost home free! After spending another minute panicking and dropping the keys on the floor, she finally gets the right key into the ignition. But it's too late! All the time she wasted fidgeting with the car keys gave the killer a chance to catch up to her, and just as she's about to start the car and drive off to safety, the killer pulls her out of the driver side window kicking and screaming. She almost made it! She would have made it too had she remembered this:

Slow is smooth; smooth is fast

Or to put that in more familiar words, haste makes waste. The concept is simple: the faster you move while completing a task, the more mistakes you make, and the longer the task ultimately takes. On the other hand taking your time means fewer mistakes, which means you will get things done faster. The concept almost seems counter intuitive; Going slow and taking your time means tasks are finished quicker. Our horror movie maiden would have escaped the killer had she gone slower and not made so many mistakes.

Programmers are infamous for pulling all night coding sessions fueled by coffee and mountain dew. When I was young I could easily write a thousand lines of code in a single sitting, and dammit, it was fun! But there was one little problem: the code I wrote was total crap. It was unreadable, undocumented, untested, unmaintainable, and worst of all it was full of logic errors. The types of logic errors I could have avoided had I not been mentally traveling at warp speed. The time I gained on the front-end by writing my code so quickly, was lost on the back-end having to fix and rewrite it. Any happiness my clients felt from having their website finished in record time quickly evaporated when it crashed.

Slow down. Take your time. Remember to stay focused on the task at hand. Engineering requires continuous critical thinking. Rushing through a task on mental autopilot leads to mistakes, and the final code will be unorganized, unfocused, and bloated. Taking your time to do things right the first time is the difference between 40 lines of loops and if…then spaghetti code, and 10 lines of easy to maintain engineering excellence.