The Occasional Ray of Light

Writing commercial software can be depressing.
Today, the source of my malaise is the number 1531. This is, according to Jira, the number of things that Confluence doesn’t do that it should, does but shouldn’t do, or does but could do better. By the time I hit ‘publish’ on this post, that number will probably be higher.
I can’t be _too_ unhappy. This number is, after all, the basis of my job. If Confluence were somehow perfect in every way, with nothing left to add or remove, I’d be out on the street scrawling ‘Will Code for Food’ on a tattered piece of cardboard.
Or hopefully Mike and Scott would find something else for me to work on. My handwriting is terrible, and I imagine everyone would end up looking quizically at my sign and wondering what “Will Cope Fur Fwd” means?
Either way, I’m lucky the only perfect software is the program you haven’t written yet.
It’s depressing though, spending most of your time looking at your creation through a distorting lens that shows only its flaws. It’s very easy to forget that the reason people are reporting problems, and the reason people are thinking of more things they’d like the product to do is because people are _using_ it.
Which is why it’s nice to read things like this every now and then.