Spent my day wrestling operating system images onto computers. In between that, I yelled at customers. Okay, I yelled at a hardware reseller who seems absolutely determined to provide their customers with a non-functional system. At one point I snapped and asked why, given that he had gotten to a working system, he had felt the need to change a bunch of OS settings after that.
“I wanted to clean up.”
Gaaaaaaaa! The mess *is* the knowledge that we spent hours building! Only profound N00bs believe that “cleaning up” code makes it better. Debugging, optimizing, tweaking … all of these add to the “not totally clean and simple” factor in your code. Only refactoring (essentially, stepping back and rewriting a portion of the thing from scratch) can sometimes yield “cleaner” code. However, then you have to effectively debug a brand new system.
It doesn’t help that the customer has a drop dead date of tomorrow for “in production” use of the system.
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