In Praise of Slow Software Engineering
How to be a better software developer by focussing on the right tempo, not speed
Carl Honoré began “In Praise of Slow” with a confession familiar to every engineer caught between sprints and Slack: he was addicted to speed.
He could not read his son a bedtime story without checking the clock. He measured worth by how much he could cram into an hour. Then he realised that faster was not better — it was merely faster. The book then becomes a hymn to what happens when we recover the lost art of tempo, of living — and therefore working — at the right speed.
Software development, perhaps more than any other craft, has become the purest expression of the cult of speed. We celebrate velocity, throughput, release cadence, the infinite conveyor belt of “continuous everything.” We reward motion more than meaning. We confuse shipping with progress. And yet, beneath all the dashboards and dopamine, something quieter inside us senses the absurdity: we are producing more code than comprehension.
Honoré’s slow movement was never about idleness. It was about discernment — knowing when to move quickly and when to linger. That same wisdom is now vital for software. “Slow” does not mean waterfall or bureaucracy, not typing over vibing; it means presence. It means designing systems with the patience to understand their consequences. It means allowing architectures to mature like wine, rather than forcing them to ferment overnight in a sprint retrospective.
To code slowly is to remember that software is written for humans first and machines second. The compiler may prefer precision, but people thrive on clarity. The slow engineer knows that a well-named variable, a thoughtful comment, a refactor done without haste — these are acts of respect for future readers, including one’s future self and even future collaborating AI “Djinn”.
In Honoré’s world, the slow meal replaces fast food; in ours, the slow review replaces the performative PR approval. The slow conversation replaces the ping-pong of chat messages. The slow release — properly instrumented, reversible, understood — replaces the hero deploy at midnight. Slowness becomes a virtue not because it resists change, but because it ensures that positive change endures.
Every culture worships something. Ours worships speed because it confuses urgency with importance. It is our addiction, and the price is even larger than poor systems, it is human waste and burnout collateral damage.
As the systems we build grow more intertwined with human lives — from banking to healthcare to the quiet logic that runs our streets — the cost of haste rises. A rushed migration, a skipped test, a half-understood dependency can ripple outward like an unhandled exception in the social fabric. Slow engineering is not nostalgia; it is responsibility.
There is, too, an aesthetic dimension. Slowness restores the possibility of beauty. When you stop coding against the clock, you start hearing the rhythm in your own logic — the cadences of clarity, the pauses of elegance. You rediscover what Richard Gabriel called habitability — the feeling that a system is a place you would gladly live in. Fast engineering builds fortresses of technical debt; slow engineering builds gardens of comprehension.
Honoré wrote that slowing down allows time to become “a medium of connection rather than constraint.” In software, that connection is between people and ideas. The pace of conversation determines the quality of collaboration. The slower we go at the right moments — to listen, to read, to truly grasp another person’s intent — the faster the team as a whole can move with confidence later.
So this article, this manifesto, is not an argument against agility. It is a reminder of what agility was meant to preserve: adaptability through awareness. To go slow is to notice. To notice is to learn. And to learn is to move, in the long run, with effortless grace.
Slow is not the opposite of fast. It is the opposite of careless.
And perhaps, when the world’s next outage or algorithmic catastrophe is traced back to a moment of haste, we’ll remember Honoré’s quiet rebellion — and choose, next time, to type one thoughtful line instead of ten rushed ones.
The 2 A.M. Deploy & The Quiet Commit
The release was due at dawn. The dashboards glowed like a nervous heartbeat.
Someone, somewhere, said, “We just need to ship.” And so they did.
They merged a half-read pull request, skipped a failing test, silenced the lint warnings with a weary sigh. The Slack channel pulsed with emojis — rockets, beers, gratitude gifs. For a moment, everything looked fine.
Until it wasn’t.
The error appeared first as a whisper in the logs, then a roar in production.
Transactions hung, metrics spiked, alerts fanned out like birds startled into the night. By sunrise, the incident bridge was full of tired voices blaming race conditions, dependencies, time zones, fate. Anything but haste.
Days later, in the quiet post-mortem, someone scrolled back through the commit history and saw a TODO that read simply, “Refactor later — no time now.”
There it was — the fingerprint of speed’s seduction. A single skipped moment of care that multiplied into chaos.
No villain. No malice. Just the cult of velocity, practiced faithfully until it burned its own temple down.
In another organisation, in another timezone it was a Tuesday afternoon in late spring — the kind of day that passed unnoticed by most, except for the soft hum of concentration in the engineering room.
A young developer named Mara sat staring at a small, awkward function. It worked, technically. It even passed the tests. But something about it whispered fragile.
The stand-up was over. The sprint board was waiting. The dopamine hit of “Done” beckoned. She could have shipped it and no one would have noticed.
Instead, she stayed.
She renamed a variable. Broke a method into two. Wrote a comment not to explain, but to remind. Then she did something radical: she closed her laptop and went for a walk.
When she returned, she reread her code and smiled. It was simpler now — not clever, not flashy, but inevitable. The kind of code you can trust in the dark.
No ceremony marked the moment. No one cheered. But three months later, when the service was extended, her teammates found her work and understood it immediately. No questions, no Slack messages, no swearing. Just quiet gratitude.
Somewhere in the metrics, there was no trace of her decision. No dashboard measures the cost of patience or the return on care. But that’s how slowness wins — invisibly, beautifully, one line at a time.
A Slow Manifesto for Software Engineers
“Fast engineering solves the wrong problem quickly.
Slow engineering solves the right one elegantly.”
Slow is not lazy — it’s precise.
In a world addicted to velocity, slowness becomes a form of courage. The fast engineer ships features; the slow engineer ships understanding.
Slowness is not about delay — it’s about depth. It’s the discipline to ask, “Why this?” before typing, “How fast?”
A practice to consider
Pause before you push. Read the diff aloud. Ask one more clarifying question. These micro-delays compound into macro-quality.
Measure tempo, not time
The question isn’t “How long will it take?” but “What tempo does this require?”
Debugging demands stillness; incident response demands urgency. Architecture needs long, wandering conversations. CI/CD pipelines need rhythm.
Each deserves its own beat.
A practice to consider
Design your day like a jazz score — crescendos of deep work, rests of reflection.
Slow Workshops and Meetings
Fast workshops and meetings breed shallow consensus. Slow workshops and meetings — the ones with silence, sketches, and genuine listening — yield coherence.
The goal is not to speak quickly but to think clearly.
A practice to consider
Use the “two-minute pause”: after every complex idea, everyone stops to write what they heard.
Then compare notes. Watch alignment emerge.
Refactor as reflection
Refactoring is the meditative act of software. It’s how we breathe between movements — how we remember what our system means.
To refactor slowly is to tend a garden, not fight a fire.
A practice to consider
Set aside unhurried hours for code (and documentation) gardening. Not sprint debt, not KPIs — just care.
Slow design prevents fast disasters
A rushed architecture looks brilliant in the stand-up and catastrophic in production.
Design deserves fermentation time — the “overnight effect” where clarity arrives after sleep. Time to explore and see what survives, to discover and craft your residuals.
A practice to consider
Write design docs that age overnight before review.
A night’s distance can turn bias into insight.
Slow culture builds durable teams
Speed culture burns trust. Slow culture invests in psychological safety, shared literacy, and humane cadence.
Velocity is a side effect of coherence, not its cause.
A practice to consider
Celebrate learning rates, not sprint velocities. Replace “How fast did we ship?” with “How well do we understand what we built?”
The true performance metric is peace of mind
High throughput means nothing if everyone’s burnt out, context-switched, numb.
Sustainable delivery feels calm, not frantic. Slow engineering produces fewer incidents, lower turnover, higher pride.
A practice to consider
Instrument for human observability: track on-call sleep, morale, cognitive load.
Slow down to go deep
Slowness in software is the art of staying with complexity long enough for insight to bloom. It’s reading code like literature, designing systems like music, and debugging like meditation.
It’s how we build products and platforms that outlast trends — and teams that outlast projects.
“The work we are afraid to slow down for is the work that might finally matter.”
The world doesn’t need faster engineers. It needs steadier ones — those who can hold complexity without panicking, who can let silence do its work, who can remember that the best systems are written by collaborations unhurried and minds unfractured.
In software as in life: the right speed is the one that lets you stay human.
Further Reading
Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community (1996) — Richard P. Gabriel
In Praise of Slow: Challenging the Cult of Speed (2004) — Carl Honoré