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"Can anything be sadder than work unfinished? Yes; work never begun."
-- Christina Rossetti
I tend to write a good deal of code from month to month; some for work,
some for personal use; some large projects, some small. Normally I stop
writing once the result is something that does what I need at that
particular moment, which unfortunately is also usually something that
isn't very customizable without hacking the source code. Despite best
intentions, plans to come back at a later date to polish and release
publicly rarely end up working out due to time constraints imposed by
Life. As a result, most of what I write never gets published.
Part of the reason I feel so strongly about only releasing tools which are
complete, highly flexible, and fully configurable at runtime is that
otherwise they end up being of little use to anyone. Experience has shown
me that in most cases, hard coded values which seem appropriate while a
tool is being written turn out only to be appropriate for a small number
of scenarios.
Darxus, a friend of mine, yells
at me from time to time about this, encouraging me to release anyway. He
argues that something, even if incomplete at the moment, is better than
nothing, and that it is impossible to say what may or may not be useful to
someone out there. He has a point. Afterall, isn't one of the benefits
of the open source movement that one individual can start a project, and
another individual pick up where he left off, without having to start from
scratch?
Still, for now, there's not much listed on these pages. I hope to change
that in the future.
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