One of the speakers I heard at the Council on Foundations was Mr. Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. One of the stories he told ended with a musician's realization of the 'Beyond the Fuck It' principle, aka BTFI.

The general principle is that when you get to the 'fuck it all' stage of despair, you can come through the other end with an attitude of 'well now that I've said fuck it I can do things my way and I don't care what happens.'

Anyhow, one of the things that's been on my list for a long time is to get Fury.com into a CVS code revisioning system so I can have a real development deployment and a real production deployment and I just need to republish to update production Fury to the last stable version. the sad truth is that this hasn't happened, and so I only make changes to Fury piece by safe piece.

Until I get to BTFI, that is. When that happens you can keep viewing the site and see it work, fail, look really strange, go haywire, until my changes are incorporated and working on the live site. One thing for certain: It makes me sure to complete a feature change before I tire of it, because I'm not going to go to sleep with the site broken.

Anyhow, I'm just about there, which is a good thing for progress, but a bad thing for someone who would like to think of himself as a pragmatic programmer.

Does knowing the 'right way' and not doing it the 'right way' make me a little better than someone who's stupid through ignorance?