December Dumbass

Don't be a schmuck.

This is Jackie Mason's advice about financial investments. Or how to buy a suit. Or how to treat your mother. I think it's his advice about everything.

He's right. Especially about software release dates.

In my infinite wisdom, last year I decided we needed to release Code Collaborator v2.0 at "the end of the year." This was brilliant because: Since everyone is on vacation at the end of the year, the office will be relatively quiet and we can get the release done.

What I didn't consider was that we would be on vacation too. And that the customers who we imagined were anxiously awaiting our release were also on vacation.

So after killing ourselves, and slipping to Jan 20 anyway, turned out no one cared. We cared about our deadlines much more than anyone else.

Even when you have people waiting for a release, remember that they'll upgrade when it makes sense for them. If you're in the middle of a release cycle, you probably won't spend the time, take the risk, and get retrained on an upgrade. We're the same way -- a new version of the profiler we use came out during our 2.0 crunch, but there's no way we had the time to mess with it then. Even if it's better.

So this time we released v4.0 beta on Oct 1, and we expect to exit beta before the end of the year. But if we don't, we don't care!