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Speed matters (2021)

This post is part of a series, starting at Reflections on a decade of coding. I think that one of the most important things to focus on improving is how fast you can work.

Most of the speedup is down to setting much more concrete goals and being much faster at making mundane design decisions (eg what features to support, how to structure code, what to name things), but I also got a lot of benefit from better work processes and from low-level mechanical speedups like writing fewer silly bugs. I learned the basics of graphics programming, I got to try out some unusual architecture ideas, I get the satisfaction of working every day with a tool that I made myself and I now have a small familiar codebase that I can use for other experiments. Any process that you can make automatic, any decision or context switch that you can avoid, frees up mental resources that can be redeployed elsewhere.

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