Developing software is great, but… I think we can all agree it can be a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. At the beginning, everything is great. You add new features one after another in a matters of days if not hours. You’re on a roll!
Fast forward a few months, and your development speed decreases. Is it because you are not working as hard as before? Not really. Let’s fast forward a few more months, and your development speed drops further. Working on this project is not fun anymore and has become a drag.
It gets worse. You start discovering multiple bugs in your application. Often, solving one bug creates two new ones. At this point, you can start singing:
99 little bugs in the code.
99 little bugs.
Take one down, patch it around,…127 little bugs in the code.
How do you feel about working on this project now? If you are like me, you probably start losing your motivation. It’s just a pain to develop this application, since every change to existing code can have unpredictable consequences.
This experience is common in the software world and can explain why so many programmers want to throw their source code away and rewrite everything.
