This meant I really cared about getting
the design and code right, and bugs were
a personal failure.
I accepted that I would have a rare one, and
that it would be fixed immediately.
This was in about 30,000 lines of pointer heavy
'C' and Oracle Pro-C code. Bugs meant core dumps.
It was rare that a user would experience it, since
the OS would kill my program way before then.
This was when I was responsible for the design
and coding of an in-house editorial system that
had 30 active editorial users, and produced monthly
data dumps that were then published on Compuserve,
CD-ROM, and printed book.
I had 1 bad output in 3 years, and was fixed in
24 hours. My users never lost one byte of data,
even in the event of hardware failure.
Now I do junk mail. Dead trees. Marketing databases.
Fuzzy yucky data, where there is a percentage of known
bad data, it as long as it is under the magical
max, it is ok.
ok.
ok.
ewwwwww.
I gotta go wash my hands.
But:
I've got to hit the print date.
I've got hundreds of people at various companies
sitting and idling if I miss the print date.
So as long as it is good enough, it really is "good enough".