>>Everyday one faces the decision of doing 3 things well or 10 things poorly. The big difference for me is that if I do 3 things well, I can say that they are done and move on to 3 new things. If I do 10 things poorly, it just seems that I keep doing them over, and over and over again and never quite complete them. Deva vu all over again!
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>I've seen a fellow coder who was still using Accept commands in 1992... I fixed it for him a few times, and asked him why does he still keep it, specially for dates - the code to check if the value entered was a date was a major hassle anyway (i.e. the users had to enter the date in the exact format else it would loop until they did). He said he didn't have the time. He still gave the same answer a year later.
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>I have taken a different route - I've done major revisits to many areas of my code several times over, and fixed things one by one. And believe it or not, in the end I had code which just plain works, no customer calls, and I had time for new development.

A survey was done about "successful" software development companies. The surveyors thought initially that the difference between successful and non-successful shops was that the successful ones would have fewer problems.

They discovered the contrary to be the case. If anything, the successful companies had more acknowledged problems. The difference, however, was that they SOLVED their problems. Because staff had confidence that basically any problem was solvable, they didn't hide problems they were aware of. Hence, the higher visibility of more problems. By contrast, the unsuccessful shops had one or two big problems around that they never quite got their hands around.

Jay

P.S. Do I recall that you hark from Serbia? My grandfather was a Slovene and with great pride took us on a tour of his beautiful motherland back in the late 60's. On the trip, we did visit a sister of his in Belgrade. It was the most pleasant vacation I've ever spent -- although it was my first visit with the many of my cousins, we were instantly welcomed as part of a long lost family. And, we had our share of slivovitz!

Jay