[[!tag philosophical sofware-development success]]

I wrote these when I woke up one night and had trouble getting back to sleep, and spent a while in a very philosophical mood thinking about life, success, and productivity as a programmer.

Imagine you're developing a piece of software.

• You don't know it works, unless you've used it.

• You don't know it's good, unless people tell you it is.

• You don't know you can do it, unless you've already done it.

• You don't know it can handle a given load, unless you've already tried it.

• The real bottlenecks are always a surprise, the first time you measure.

• It's not ready for production until it's been used in production.

• Your automated tests always miss something, but with only manual tests, you always miss more.