Best practices can slow your application down
In my opinion, the idea that you can have well-tested code OR performance is tosh.<p>If you don’t have good testing and do it regularly how can you refactor your application for speed if you’re not going to be sure that you’re going to introduce a regression?<p>And I think the stackoverflow team know it:<p>&gt; Currently, we’re trying to change this. We’re actively trying to write more tests and make our code more testable. It’s an engineering goal we aim to achieve, but the changes needed are significant.<p>This makes it sound like a lofty goal but I think it just sounds more like. “Oh crap, we’re sitting on a mountain of tech debt”<p>No I know you can’t always expect to arrive at a project and find the sunny uplands of TDD and continuous delivery but if you do get to “optimised for speed” code (to me that’s a synonym for tech debt that’s slowing down delivery) all you can do is slowly add what should have been done in the first place (tests).