Festina lente, “hurry slowly,” attributed to Augustus, is one of those aphorisms that hums with paradox.
Simultaneously aphoristic and maddeningly opaque. It’s the kind of thing that, if you say it with enough gravitas, people will nod in sagacious agreement, even if they don’t quite know what it means. But beneath the veneer of paradox lies a surprisingly useful directive, particularly for those of us mucking about in the peculiar and fraught business of software engineering.
The temptation in software engineering is always toward speed, to launch now, iterate later, push through technical debt because we need features live yesterday. It’s the managerial version of bread and circuses: show the stakeholders some progress, no matter how brittle the scaffolding underneath. But Augustus, in his stolid, marble-bust wisdom, reminds us that haste without thought invites ruin.
This is the “hurry” part of festina lente: momentum is necessary.
Software that doesn’t ship is software that doesn’t matter. But — and this is where the “slowly” comes in — momentum without direction is chaos. You can’t just lurch forward without considering the long-term maintainability of what you’re building, lest you find yourself several sprints deep into an impenetrable jungle of spaghetti code, where every bug fix spawns three more bugs hydra-like.
“Hurry slowly” in software engineering means prioritizing intentionality.
It’s the art of balancing velocity and diligence: shipping fast, but only after you’ve refactored that function so it’s not an unholy mess of nested conditionals. It means designing your API endpoints with enough foresight that future developers (or future you) don’t curse your name in the Slack channels of 2027. It’s about treating documentation as a first-class citizen, rather than the forlorn afterthought it so often becomes.
In the end, festina lente is less a strategy than a sensibility. It’s the reminder that haste is meaningless if it isn’t tempered by care. Because building good software is hard—like, epically hard, in the old-school sense of “epic,” involving heroes and trials and long nights hunched over a keyboard trying to debug a null pointer exception that somehow only happens in production. But Augustus knew something we’re only starting to figure out: if you want your Rome to endure, you don’t build it in a day. You build it with intention. Slowly, but never stopping.