The Price of Perfection

Apr 23

The Price of Perfection

Perfectionism: Joel makes some good points about how we programmers have a tendency to try make things perfect beyond any practical benefit. He’s touched on this before as well, with a story about the Netscape refactoring.

Perfectionism is a very dangerous quality in business and in life, because by being perfectionist about one thing you are, by definition, neglecting another.

The three days I spent insuring that all icons in CityDesk 3.0 are displayed with perfect alpha-blended effects came at the price of having a web site where the descender of the “g” is not a hyperlink. And both are at the price of working on my next book, or writing another article for Joel on Software, or making CityDesk publish really big sites faster.

by Deane April 23, 2004 9:29 AM

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