Comment by didibus

1 year ago

Ya, I think this is a great insight. In today's world, code is not released as a versioned artifact sold on a disc or downloaded. The idea of "shipping" is fuzzy. You might be 100% in production with some change and it could still leave edge case, deficiencies, etc. You can decide to address them now or later. And it's all just perception. You can say it's good enough, we shipped, let's forget about this whole thing and move to another. Or you can keep ironing out the quirks.

I've "shipped" things in the past that were turned on to less than 1% of the time, and we left it at that, and moved on to other things. It was considered "shipped". Everyone was worried to increase it to beyond 1%, so we all patted ourselves in the back for the great launch and went to work on other things.

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didibus

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bigiain  1 year ago

There was always something intensely satisfying about walking into some retail store and seeing boxes on the shelf containing CDs with software I'd written.

(On the flip side, there was that one time we had to destroy 5,000 CDs because they had a Quicktime Autostart virus on them...)

  • OnlyMortal  1 year ago

    Heh. I can relate to seeing your product on a shelf.

    I recall seeing IBM ViaVoice X on shelves a Circuit City. It was rather an ego trip.

    • Aeolun  1 year ago

      Sometimes it’s odd to realize there’s people that can say this while simultaneously not being my grandfather. There’s a whole period of computer history I skipped.

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