David Welborn’s Blog

I said that today in a meeting and it struck me how true it is.  I wanted to write it down somewhere. Every time we’re asked to rush something into production or add a ‘temporary’ hack, we have to stop and remember this simple phrase.  Are we really doing right by the sales person that is pressuring us to go against our own better judgement? Or we just adding to ever growing pile of issues to be addressed at a later date?  Sometimes, stopping to think for a second lets you realize that doing things the ‘right’ way only means a little more time and even maybe the same effort as the hack you are rushing to put in.  While this sounds stupidly obvious, its easy to forget when your office is filled with people clamoring for your attention, each with their own unrealistic timeline requirements. I think that by sticking to our guns as architects and developers, we are actually doing a proper service to the very same folks who are asking us to take the shortcuts and bend our own rules.  By allowing ourselves to enter into ‘hack’ mentality, we are doing a disservice to ourselves, the company, and to the very people pressuring us to do so.

Oddly enough, I don’t find myself rejoicing over the death of Osama Bin Laden like I thought I would. I do understand that killing/capturing him had to be done, but I don’t know how much it really accomplished in the big picture. The fundamentalist thinking that organized itself around his persona is still alive and well and may be even more motivated than before.

You might wonder what would possess someone to start a blog for everyone to see. It turns out I’ve had a lot of experiences in life that appear to be interesting to others. While telling people my anecdotes of life in other countries or unusual situations, people have mentioned to me that I should write a book about these. Since the passage of time is beginning to impact the clarity of some of my older memories, I thought I would at least capture these in a blog as time permits. Maybe what makes one’s life interesting to others is the intensity in which one lives and observes it in the moment. Not really sure, to be honest….