At around 10 PM a felt the need to go home, this is very
rare. Then, I knew why I did it! I always felt and believed
that there is a reason for everything happens in my life,
even if sometimes is a bit hard to find or understand it.

So I went home, I started the TV and switched to National
Geographic (documentary channels are very popular here in
Europe), and guess what was running ? Code Rush ! The
documentary made about the Netscape company before and after
Mozilla. It was cool. For the first time I saw how JWZ is
looking, weird :),

The conclusions ? Hey programmers everywhere feel and work
pretty much in the same way! Lost nights, hopes, frustration,
endless study and coding, …. Another conclusion! Netscape,
despite all what happened, ended reasonable. I mean the code
is out (Open Source), so it’s good for community, and it
made quite a few of millionaires. It could have been worse.

Personal Code Rush

Usually we go with Agile kind of development methodologies,
which basically means we don’t do huge upfront design, just
enough to get the picture and start a first iteration, and
the we code along. This worked quite well until now, with
our previous projects, but seems that is not universal
panacea.

I’m working right now on an cute scripting language and it
worked out quite well, up to a point when it became obvious
that the design was not quite correct. This usually happens,
and can be solved with a small refactoring. Well it turned
out the refactoring needed is not that small after all.

A couple of days on the drawing board produced the correct
design (at least it seems correct). The morale of the story
? Be careful, not everything can be done in small
iterations and still be economic. To be honest if I would
stick to the book, religiously, the problem might have been
corrected in time, but that is the problem with Agile methods
and XP, how many stick to the book exactly?