The Mind of Steve

 Check out Guitar George, he knows all the chords Mind, it's strictly rhythm; he doesn't wanna' make it cry or sing Yes an old guitar is all he can afford When he gets up under the lights to play his thing ... We are the Sultans, We are the Sultans of Swing Dire Straits, Sultans of Swing (1978) A staple of classic-rock stations, Dire Straits' Sultans of Swing has this wonderful interplay between the amateurs and the experts. The song's story is set in a jazz bar, with Dire Straits laying down the music and painting themselves as the bar's titular jazz-and-more house band. Their own musical expertise is undeniable, filled with warm harmonies, smooth transitions and an ever-changing series of musical movements. But the house band at the centre of the story does not hog all the mic time; they let others have turns, like the decidedly more amateur Guitar George. Beyond being professionals, the musicians in Dire Straits are also clearly specialists in their instrumen...

The reason for the detour is gone,  but you'll be taking those extra steps forever!  Our new CTO does not believe in Technical Debt. If you are not familiar with the concept, Technical Debt is a metaphor first proposed by Wade Cunningham in the early 1990s. In an Experience Report for OOPSLA 1992 (the annual conference for Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications), he wrote: Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite. ... The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a stand-still under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation, object-oriented or otherwise. As a manager of teams responsible for maintaining apps built upon legacy code, I see the impacts of that technical debt on a regular basis. Some business logic got buried in...