In the television show about corrupt cops The Shield, Curtis Lemansky, one of the main characters, once said “Why can’t we just do our jobs, and stop?“. That quote came back to me while reading Jason Friend’s book Rework.
Rework is A) about doing the bare minimum, B) starting now, and C) completing the work as fast as possible. On The Shield, the characters spend most of their time trying to cover up a few early crimes, which are the corrupt cop equivalent of cool, unrequested features.
Both of those notions seem relevant to me as I’ve spent two hours trying to fix a special “feature” on a website I built several years ago. The client did not ask for the feature in the original specification but it was easy enough build, and I thought the client would like it. She liked it, and she was happy with that I “Under-promised and over-delivered.” Now that feature conflicts with some new security feature(!) on the server and I’ve spent two hours getting it to work. Two unbillable hours gone fixing something the client never wanted enough to ask or pay for. Now that I think about it most of my “emergency” fixes have centered around unrequested features that people liked, but didn’t need.
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Growing up all of my teachers told me that my handwriting was horrible and needed improvement. I took two years of Russian in college and somehow learning Cyrillic made my handwriting even worse. My first few jobs after college had varying degrees of handwriting needed, but over time, and especially after I moved to development full time, I wrote things out longhand less and less.
