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.

Techy Comic Relief

From the Comic Strip “Bound and Gagged”: Moses’s Tablets

LoL, Ironic Isn’t It?

Excerpted From http://mike.elgan.com/post/6240583704/irony-alert-china-imports-chopsticks-from-the-usa:

Chinese takeout food with chopsticks

The best and most popular chopsticks in the world come from the American state of Georgia. One company called Georgia Chopsticks makes an incredible 2 million chopsticks a day, which are exported to China mostly, but with some ending up in Korea, Japan and the United States.

Comic Relief: Waldo, meet Carmen

Today’s strip is from “Mother Goose and Grimm”:

Carmen San Diego was one of my favorite computer games when I was a kid. My friend L. and I were running around for days announcing “We caught Carmen! We caught Carmen!” after we finally won the game together.

Computer Science 101

I was a bit amused because one of the things I noticed when I was tutoring intro to computer science was exactly that, thinking computer science was about designing and playing video games. Many of those were the same people who ended up hating programming and changing majors, it just wasn’t what they expected it to be, more work, less fun.

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

Safety Fail

I haven’t laughed this hard in a while!

From FailBlog:


Original URL: http://failblog.org/2009/02/12/safety-fail-8/ (no longer valid)

Installers

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