[chikere232]

The title kinda glossed over the fact that they started out with working, fast code, and then broke it. Sure, their fix was faster than their most broken version, but it's less impressive than starting with slow code and improving it.

[bastawhiz]

They said they made the change because the code was starting to become hard to maintain. That's not a terrible reason for refactoring.

[notjoemama]

I think they were referring to the degree of speed up.

[bastawhiz]

The degree of speedup is the refactored code being fixed to not be slow.