Slow is smooth and smooth is fast

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

– Common US Marines expression

Restoring your production database from backup takes time…especially the first few times. So does building a new dev environment for an onboarding engineer. And safely and reliably pointing your infrastructure at a different application container version than latest. But by owning that these things are slow, and doing them slowly and repeatedly before you need to, you can ensure that doing these tasks is smooth.

Slow is smooth.

It’s 3am when the page comes in. Things look bad; half your services are down, and there’s likely to be some data loss. You alert the stakeholders and support parties that have context, formally start an incident log, and pull up the checklist for each element of the situation: data integrity, backup restoration, blast radius limitation…

Nobody wants to be in this situation, but you’ve practiced the start of this, planned around it, and you’re ready to go. The next few hours will be stressful, and you’ll have a few surprises in there, but you’ve already got a plan, and your and your team’s fingers have gone through these steps enough times that it’s practically muscle memory.

It’s smooth.

And smooth is fast.