Statements like "just pretend you know what you're doing" should raise
red flags because it leads to "doing anything at all, even it is bad, is
good". One might as well forget trying to know in favor of pretending
to know, because doing something (anything) makes you right. But of
course, no amount of pretense will make software work when it's critical
for it to work at a customer's site, or when doing a demo of your
research work while defending your thesis. Not only that, but doing
something any which way has the hidden cost of incurring into software
debt. Exactly how much cleanup homework are we still dealing with
because of that kind of attitude? Are we happy with the results?
Things that Work(TM) don't happen by accident, they are the product of
significant amounts of effort. Shoddy code that appears to work some of
the time is Just Bad(TM), and sooner or later you pay for it ***with
interest***.
On 5/18/11 4:17 , Marcus Denker wrote:
The Cult of Done Manifesto
- There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
- Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
- There is no editing stage.
- Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you
are doing,
so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.
- Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done,
abandon it.
- The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
- Once you're done you can throw it away.
- Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.
- People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
- Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
- Destruction is a variant of done.
- If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of
done.
- Done is the engine of more.
http://www.brepettis.com/blog/2009/3/3/the-cult-of-done-manifesto.html?v=1
--
Marcus Denker -- http://www.marcusdenker.de
INRIA Lille -- Nord Europe. Team RMoD.
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