In a weird zeitgeist moment. This truism has popped up twice today.
The first was a post on the anaconda devel list
here
Most of what we work on is either giant new features or critical bugs
that prevent installations from succeeding. What gets lost in all this
is the pile of very small, very simple, but very annoying bugs that
don't cause anaconda to fail but don't make it look good either.
You know the kinds of bugs I'm talking about - deprecation warnings,
messages getting printed to tty1, dialogs that either don't go away or
don't display in the right place, progress bars that don't move, etc.
and then a link from kottke
here:
One of the developers I work with said this after I complained about a lingering issue in one of our products. It rings true. When deadlines are tight, and there is more work to get done than there are developers or hours in the schedule, it’s not the squeaky wheel, but the jammed one that gets the grease. The lesson, then, is to make sure it gets done right the first time. You never know when you’ll have the opportunity to revisit it.
It's a constant irritant at my work. I put something in that works, but doesn't work perfectly, I think I'll get around to fixing it later. Later never comes. If it's not done right the first time, it's going to hang around and irritate you forever. Lesson: Do it right the first time.