We’ve all been there. You’ve gotten a report from a customer that one of your screens is agonizingly slow to load. You load it up and sure enough, it’s crawling. You think to yourself “Why didn’t I see this coming? How could I have written such sloppy code?”

You did it the right way.

Slow code is a good thing. If you have slow code, that means you didn’t pre-optimize your software with what you guessed was going to happen in the future. Now, you’ve got your slow code right in front of you along with the perfect dataset to test it out with. You can solve a real life problem right now.

The alternative would be trying to guess at what sorts of data your customers would throw at your screen one day and coming up with a solution that may or may not solve for the type of data your customers actually do throw at you.

Performance issues are good. The right time to speed up your code is when it gets slow, and no sooner.