Funny, because aside from some cheap tools and coffee, time is pretty much the only thing a developer needs to do anything. What I've experienced is that in op

Funny, because aside from some cheap tools and coffee, time is pretty much the only thing a developer needs to do anything. What I've experienced is that in open source projects, patches get rejected and rejected until everyone agrees they're good enough, and sometimes that takes months or years of iteration. Not good enough? Spend more time on it. That's how things improve. Wanna write a test suite? Need time. Wanna run a battery of static analysis tools and inspect their output? Need time. Wanna run a fuzzer? Need time. Wanna document things? Need time. Wanna rework the buggy guts of your application? Need time. Want to figure out the heisenbug that rears its head every once in a while? Need time. Realize the API the guy before you wrote is crap and needs to be rewritten, and all components that depend on it need to be updated to match the new API? Need time. Want to formally verify that the core mechanisms of your critical application are correct? Need time. Need to figure out and rewrite the part of the program that slows everything down to a miserable crawl? Need time. On the projects I'm on right now, I could think of months of stuff to do to get them to a state where I'm somewhat happy with them. Every goddamn thing just takes time and not much else. And IME the commercial world presents the same problem over and over again, far too often: you don't have time, you can't bill your customer for all the work that should be done (if good software were a concern), and you can't block the thing they want just because you first want to fix three other things that'd take a while to do. Crap just accumulates, because people build in a hurry, on a bad foundation. Even open source projects where deadlines and "we sold this as an item that takes three days of work" aren't a thing, time is always a problem because there's only so many people putting hours in.