I was literally told to set up this new service as quickly as possible and it didn’t need to be correct or best practice because this was just a proof of concept.
Here we are 6 months later and I’m still cleaning up my own mess.
Missing my projector and gaming PC I set them up in a spare room before I had time to properly renovate. To mark the permanent nature of the room I elected to call it The Provisorium.
The motto I got from working at an ISP was “There is nothing more permanent then a temporary fix.”
It will be in production for 10 years
In 25 years someone’s going to discover a dust covered raspberry pi hosting the poc service in the back of a network cabinet and unplug it, bringing down the rest of production
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. That said, it’s vanishingly rare that I’ve regretted designing something for long term use rather than just hacking it together.
Taking the extra time to document stuff, to add guard rails/error handling, to make a piece of script easier to re-use, to actually plan something rather than building it as you go… almost always a good use of time.
Amen, wizardbeard.
My boss convinced me to make a pricing calculator for our contracts using Excel with macros. I pushed back and said we need to use Power Apps, CRM, or anything other than Excel. He said it would just be a POC/wireframe we’d use to build a more permanent solution with later.
Well 5 years later, there are like 2 dozen versions floating around with different macros, pricing, etc. And of course I’m the one who gets messaged every time some makes a change and breaks the damn thing, or some sales person is convinced it’s not calculating correctly. I fucking HATE that Excel sheet.
If it’s on Excel365, you can edit permissions for specific cell ranges. That way your colleagues can only give input but they can’t change formulas or fixed pricing.
