Todays Work is Tomorrow’s Raw Material

I saw this on Quora a while ago, and have been meaning to share it:

Software is one of the very few things where yesterday’s work output is most of today’s raw material. If you dig one ditch poorly, so what? You move on. But you can’t move on from a bad night’s coding. Your mistakes stick with you until you clean them up. Most people don’t, which is why a lot of software projects are a morass of bugs, messy code, and chaos, yielding low productivity and terrible morale.

-William Pietri on Quora

It’s good food for thought about technical debt. It doesn’t always make business-sense to go spend the time to clean up all the technical debt right away, but sooner or later it catches up with you if you continue to work on the same code-base.

Quote of the Day

“Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.”
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/09/23.html

Thoughts about Twitter

“What can be said in 140 characters is either trivial or abridged; in the first case it would be better not to say it at all, and in the second case it would be better to give it the space it deserves.”

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/17/why-i-dont-use-twitter/

River of News?

“BTW, this is also why the river of news approach doesn’t work for everyone. If you’re subscribed solely to feeds from popular blogs and web sites, a river of news is ideal – you get a flow of information that you can scan for stuff that looks interesting. If you miss a story, no big deal – it’ll float by later if it’s important. But if you’re also subscribed to feeds critical to your business, this approach is unacceptable. You don’t want a flow of uncategorized, unprioritized information that combines articles from Boing Boing with items from your company’s internal feeds. You need separation between the stuff you read for fun and the stuff you read because it’s critical to your job.”
http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2009/05/a-listers-are-late-to-the-stream.html

A George-ism I need to remember more often…

“Don’t look at the size of the mountain, talk to the one who can move it.” -George Clerie

Installers

You ever think…you can’t have an installler without the word stall in there somewhere? ::yawn::

Ubiquity Trumps Policy

Quote of the day: “well intentioned standards bodies and departments of justice can do their best, but at the end of the day, volume deployment is the only setter of standards. Ubiquity trumps policy, just about every time.” -Johnathan Schwartz

In my observations, that certainly seems to be true, whether you’re talking about browser standards, cellphones, or something else entirely.

“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”

Did it ever occur to you to wonder why you would even need to pray for God’s will to be done on earth the way it is done in Heaven? Whose will is being done on earth if its not God’s? Man’s? Satan’s? (Mt. 6:10)

Geek LoL of the Day

“Building log4cpp with MSVC++ 5 is not supported and will not be, unless someone can find a way to do so without mutilating the source code.”

Geek humor

I saw this licence plate frame today: “you can’t spell geek without EE”.

Ohhh I’m such a geek. That totally made me smile and laugh…at least after a moment once I’d processed why it was funny….”oh EE like Electical Engineering…yep, total geek joke, obviously an engineer’s car”… If that had been my major I’d totally want one of those frames ;-).