Well the article is about speed of development, not the speed at which the code runs.
Over the years I’ve come to embrace moving fast and writing code quickly, even if it’s not the fastest. The faster I get the big things done, the more time I can spend optimizing what matters after I’ve identified it and determined it’s valuable.
Writing for PHP, I used to spend a lot of time waiting for Xdebug to trigger. Once the author released version 3.3, the improvement was so big that my own productivity went visibly up.
On the other hand, some of the biggest performance wins come from the architectural choices, and those are often done before most of the code is written.
Over the years I’ve come to embrace moving fast and writing code quickly, even if it’s not the fastest. The faster I get the big things done, the more time I can spend optimizing what matters after I’ve identified it and determined it’s valuable.