Jeff’s Austin Blues

In a podcast by people from Adaptive Path they were talking about their failures and maybe even why failure was good.  One of them said that failure is often a sign that you were trying new (and presumably, interesting) things.  It occurred to me that success is a drag, if you succeed you now have a legacy app to maintain!  Whereas if you fail, you can run on to the next interesting thing.  My experience is that the only way to escape a successful, now legacy, app is to leave the company.  And even that doesn’t always work.  Over ten years after my first for-pay programming job, a summer job, my employer tracked me down and wanted help.

While walking around Town Lake, Austin, TX (thank you Lady Bird Johnson), I was listening to a podcast by several members of Adaptive Path on their failures. One of the programmers told that he usually warns the customer that at some point in the middle of the project, he will hate them and they will hate him. I had the impression that usually this is around some particular topic, not just in general. It occurs to me that they have found the high energy topic(s). Now that it has been identified, is there a way that they can resolve the forces involved (think Design Patterns) in a better way? Time for some truely outside the box thinking. If there is that much emotion involved, the payoffs could be fantastic.