If Programmers Had To Build Planes

“Some people like to climb mountains, I like to build planes. In the air. … You never know what come across over there…”. Ad by EDS (Electronic Data Systems).

[yt]Nq55R7R-qfw[/yt]

This is a really good visualization of what is going on in programmers’ world. This is exactly what “make changes on the fly” means.

Actually, I would be very interested to see if there is a single commercial software or enterprise product, which was not built this way. Even ISO-certified companies are not an exception: they have just more formal process of doing things, but, it is the same strategy: make it fly as soon as it can fly.

This is how IT industry works: in hurry to release a product or competitors would do it first. It’s not good or bad. This is how it works. I wouldn’t blame software companies for that.

Why? Because consumers vote with their money for this method. I don’t recall people saying “I’m not buying Windows until they fix security issues and make it virus free”. No, people stimulate this approach by paying for half-done so-called “new product”.

So, I guess, it’s all right.

UPDATE: Guess what? TubeLoem plug-in, which suppose to display YouTube videos, does not work when there is a “-” character in YouTube video ID (it is “Nq55R7R-qfw”). That’s why you see [yt]…[/yt] instead of cool video. What am I doing now? Making the plug-in to work with this char. Which is… exactly: fixing the plane on the fly, because I cannot unpublish the post.

UPDATE2: Now it’s fixed. The problem was in regular expression function which TubeLoem been using. I replaced ereg() function with preg_match() and modified regular expressions, so they allow symbols “-” and “_” in YouTube ID. It took me about 1 minute to identify the problem, 10 minutes more to create new debug table in database (I wouldn’t want debug output to be printed on the screen, would I?), fix the bug, and about 10 minutes to test it and upload fixed plug-in.

UPDATE3: If you are using WordPress plug-in TubeLoem, you can find the fix here.