Love this comment because it translates so well to any mentally taxing endeavor. Writing a long-running program? Set a few assertions up front so that it fails immediately before wasting your time. Think about those "failure" condition assertions up front and save your time on practically any experiment. Even chess players do this by surrendering early when they know a game has reached a conclusion.
danuker|2 years ago
If it applies, have a "testing" version that runs quickly, on limited (but error-prone) data cases. Ideally, run it with the rest of your test suite.