About 10 years ago, I realized all the best programmers I had worked with had something in common: they were fast. By that I mean that they moved quickly: we’d discuss a problem and an hour or two later they’d already have a patch ready or a prototype to show off.
It took me a while, but eventually I realized: they weren’t fast because they were great programmers, they were great programmers because they were fast.
In my country, they say that you need to be fast when catching fleas. They also say, I can type 2000 characters per minute, but the result is a total bullshit.
I can be very fast when working on the project that I know very good. An I can be very slow when I need to understand how the code works, to learn some new API, new tools etc. If I always were fast, I’d make a lot of stupid mistakes and had to fix them wasting much more time than I spent for initial investigation.