Once upon a time, developers debated design patterns and code elegance. Now it’s “ship before product changes its mind.”
We've all been there. It's 4 PM on a Friday. Product wants the feature live by Monday. You crack your knuckles, chug your third coffee, and channel your inner speed demon. Six hours later, you've birthed a beautiful, functional mess that works perfectly, until Tuesday.
Mark Zuckerberg told us to "move fast and break things," and boy, did we listen. Except now we're moving so fast that we're breaking things we didn't even know existed yet. Future-us is sending angry emails, but present-us has a deploy to catch.
We’ve traded code reviews for Slack emojis, architecture for MVPs, and testing for “QA will catch it.”
Spoiler: QA didn’t catch it.
The Hidden Cost of Speed
Sure, we’re shipping faster. But we’re also debugging faster and refactoring forever.
Every shortcut becomes tech debt. Every “quick fix” becomes a future nightmare.
You know that feeling when you open a 6-month-old file and whisper,
-“Who wrote this garbage?”
-It was you. Past you. Rushing to meet a deadline.(Thanks to git blame)
Why We Think Less
Modern frameworks do too much thinking for us.
TypeScript, linters, AI code suggestions, all amazing tools, until we forget how to reason about complexity.
We’ve become more like code assemblers than engineers.
Everything works until it doesn’t, and when it breaks, no one knows why.
The Comeback of Craftsmanship
Moving fast is great., Thinking less is dangerous.
Clean code isn't the opposite of fast code. It's the foundation of sustainable fast code.
We can't un-break the things we broke. But we can stop breaking tomorrow's things today. We can ship fast without shipping garbage. We can be the engineers who make future-us smile instead of cry.
So next time you're about to commit that "quick fix," take a breath. Think for five minutes. Write that one comment. Name that variable properly. Your future self is watching. And they know where you live
Good engineers ship, Great engineers think.
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