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.