up to speed

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up to speed

1. (idiomatic) Fully informed; current.

   Is Mary up to speed on the situation in Kuala Lumpur?

   • 1977, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs. Subcommittee on Financial Institutions Supervision, Regulation and Insurance, The Safe banking act of 1977: hearings before the Subcommittee on Financial Institutions Supervision, Regulation, and Insurance of the Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs, House of Representatives, Ninety-fifth Congress, first session, on H.R. 9086, U.S. Government Printing Office, page 1239:

     And I don't happen to recollect whether I did bring her up to speed on what Bert was asking for and so forth.

   • 2021 January 29, John Herrman, “Everything’s a Joke Until It’s Not”, in The New York Times‎:

     In recent weeks, the only way to get up to speed with WallStreetBets would have been through full immersion, absorbing comments about “tendies” and “diamond hands” and “holding the line” until you worked up the nerve to post the group’s most beloved slogan for yourself: “We like the stock.”

2. (idiomatic) Functioning adequately.

   It may take the new hires a week or two to be brought up to speed on the system.

   • 1992 February 3, Ed Scannell, “OS/2 slowed by sales force”, in InfoWorld, InfoWorld Media Group, page 8:

     IBM has begun a program to better educate its sales force, Reiswig said, but admits it could take as long as six months to bring them up to speed.

   • 2001, Eric A. Rose, The Columbia Presbyterian Guide to Surgery‎, page 132:

     It takes time after the anesthesia for the muscles to get up to speed, so your stomach and intestines may not be functioning normally yet and you won’t be able to eat.

   • 2020, Heidi Helfand, Dynamic Reteaming: The Art and Wisdom of Changing Teams, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 54:

     For new hires joining your teams as software engineers, pair programming is a great way to bring them up to speed. It helps them ease into your codebase with a helpful in-the-moment guide, and it helps to share tribal knowledge and the technical practices that you want to be consistent across your codebase.

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