kdmurray.blog » planning http://kdmurray.net The crossroads of life and tech Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:34:17 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Learning by Disaster http://kdmurray.net/2009/01/15/learning-by-disaster/ http://kdmurray.net/2009/01/15/learning-by-disaster/#comments Thu, 15 Jan 2009 09:28:02 +0000 kdmurray http://kdmurray.net/?p=521 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.

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