Over my time in the dev space I've noticed something I find worrying. There is this unnatural focus on speed when talking about... literally anything.

I am always seeing; "it's the fastest x...", "it delivers x the fastest...", "it's the most fast..."

From package managers, build tools to frameworks. Vite, Bun, Pnpm and recently Nextjs - the main focus seems to be speed.

Most cases when I've heard discussions on package managers, speed has always been on "how fast" one is over another.

This makes no logical sense to me. As a developer, patience should one of your strong points. So why does speed seem to get more attention?

Why I Think Focusing On Speed Is Not Wise

Let's say you had something you were working on and you had to ensure certain metrics were working as efficiently as possible; say speed, performance and quality.

If you focused more on speed, the other two would suffer as a result. In your effort to make things faster, the other aspects of what you are working have the potential of becoming subpar.

In my view, if we worked on making things better across the board, the speed aspect will inherently improve.

Every time I hear "x is faster", I am brought to this quote:

My goal is not to be faster but better. Faster comes as a side effect.

• Mark Tellez

My question now is to you all:

Why Are We So Obsessed with Speed?

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