I was reading an article on Raymond Chen’s blog today really made me think. The story, for those who don’t care to read it, essentially is about a service (shell.windows.com) which was created by a Microsoft developer as a proof of concept. He ran it off a computer under his desk at first and that’s where it sat… until it stopped working one day. Now that service is run on proper infrastructure in a Microsoft data centre.
In the industry I’m in, this story really hits home. It’s very common for us to make decisions based on the short-term, tools which we don’t expect to be around for a long period of time. We should have learned over that this kind of “short-term gain” strategy almost always leads to long-term pain.
The lesson: Take some time to make sure that tools you build can be left unattended even after the cleaning crew vacuums under your desk.
Tags: Development · lesson · Microsoft · planning · productivity · Programming1 Comment
Thanks for showing me this interesting article. I can relate. If MS and the big boys can still make this mistake, it makes me wonder how many “enterprise services” my own team has running under their desks or tucked away somewhere in virtual nooks.