Tar Pits or Tar Sands?
One of my earliest memories of leafing through our old copy of Encyclopedia Britannica as a kid were the artist’s depictions of the La Brea Tar Pits, down in an area that is known today as Los Angeles. All those prehistoric animals stuck in the tar, doomed to an unpleasant death, where 40,000 years later their fossils would be found in an era of a very different type of challenging and frustrating existence – undisciplined software development. Read more
You Are What You Eat
Even without going to the dietary extremes taken on in the documentary Super Size Me, we can certainly tell when we’ve had too much to eat, when we are hungry, or when we have eaten something that doesn’t agree with us. Despite my acknowledged cravings for sweets, I know that I’m not going to be happy after the fact if I indulge in something that’s not good for me. It’s not too different in software development, where the adage of ‘garbage in, garbage out’ is an unfortunate fact of life that few of us heed. Read more
