Programming with passion
"Programming for passion -- not profit -- produces high-quality software" - This article was written 6 years ago but is still very true: http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?/petrel/971215np.htm
If it isn't broken, fix it
I've been thinking about the attitude of "if it isn't broken, don't fix it". So many IT people (admins, programmers, even business managers) have this mentality and attitude.
Whenever I see that feeling tossed around, I sense fear. Fear of making changes that might cause downtime. Admittedly, I fall into the same rut quite often - that if I touch something, it's going to affect something else that I don't know about, and my phone will be ringing shortly.
The problem with this mentality is that it prohibits innovation and improvement. My feeling is that if a easy safetynet or backup route exists to cover the worst possible outcome of making the change, then we will be more daring to make change.
Face it - it's often just impossible to maintain a duplicate enviroment for doing drastic development, testing, rewrites, and so on. And, even if there was, bugs may still only occur when realtime data is being used. --Wim
"Broken": we can define some measure of quality so we can establish whether or not we are satisfied with something.
Information systems work is guided by time: in a time of calm, we can raise our quality expectations, and fix "non-broken" things. In a time of stress, only red lights flashing will make us do something -- JMJL.