I was cruising down the highway around 110~120 kmph, though the car was capable of running at 150+ kmph I chose to keep it below 120 as the thought at the back of my mind always says it is not going to stop quickly or control the direction well in case I need to. When I am very sure that I have an open & straight road, I test the limits of the car, but will quickly pull back to manageable speeds when a turning comes in sight. During one of those high speed bursts of 160 kmph, a sports car overtook me. It did not just overtake, instead it zoomed past and disappeared out of sight. Enjoying speed was not much about the road, it was the control available in a vehicle for a driver. Sports cars don’t just go fast, they turn well, stop quickly and have lots of safety bits to protect occupants from a crash. You could ram a sports car at a high speed into a wall and walk away from the crash. If I use my passenger car downhill at 200 kmph (which I still can), that is insanity; it is not going fast.

It was when I had these thoughts that I stumbled on an article pointing out that developers who are eying for speed often compromise the safety aspects. In software development there are plenty of aspects to take care. In simple terms it is taking a problem and solving it using computers by people with various skill sets. You have analysts, developers, designers, operations etc. The very nature of different people getting involved means there is lots of communication, if there is lots of communication between people of different skill sets then there is translation loss. If there is translation loss then there will be misunderstanding and rework. If you need to rework often, then the speed at which you can code matters. If speed matters, then better be safe.

Test harness consisting of unit, integration and functional tests, static analysis, performance checks, automated deployments, coding practices all together form the safety package for software development. As the code base grows and the number of people increase the more important the safety checks become. It will always be tempting to avoid the process and get something out quickly but the price to pay will be bad. There is nothing prudent in crash landing.

Another aspect of speed that is also often compromised is sustainability. The common example given to agility and speed is Cheetah, Cheetahs can maintain its top speed only for about 90~120 seconds followed by a long dip in physical activities. Any activity that requires a spike in the output is followed by a dip. There is nothing called sustainable peak performance.

Violating safety or sustainability of speed removes control out of the equation, it makes sense only if we are crash worthy and have the energy and resources to get back to normal. Speed for the sake of speed will thrill and eventually kill.