Good read and a good reminder. My primary job isn't writing software, but from time to time I do still end up writing software. My unofficial approach has bee

Good read and a good reminder. My primary job isn't writing software, but from time to time I do still end up writing software. My unofficial approach has been to solve a given set of problems, without adding complexity or new problems. I wrote one piece of software that automated a process that had previously been 1/2 of a person's full-time job. The software I created was !@#$%^&. Part of the reason my software was so bad was because I was a relative novice programmer. But the biggest reason it was so bad was that the person who did the job had been so non-specific and inconsistent about requirements. While my software blew, I captured and solidified the underlying processes. About 3-4 years after I finished that piece of software, I heard that a "professional" software programmer was hired to rewrite it from scratch. My first thought was, "OMG, some poor slop is going to have to wade through my !@#$%^& code!!!". But then I realized that I was actually grateful. I knew my code blew and it was going to get replaced with code that hopefully doesn't blow. More importantly, I knew that I had left the next programmer so much more of a foundation than I had when I had started working on the problem. In the 3-4 years prior to the rewrite, I had been ashamed of what I had done. Since I found out about the rewrite, I've actually been really proud of my contribution. Because my biggest contribution wasn't code, it was the analysis and detailed documentation of the underlying processes.