Alfred Stieglitz: A Wet Day on the Boulevard, Paris (1894, printed c. 1897)

"Becoming seems to be what we really are when we insist that we are anything at all."

Defining "done" was one enduring difficulty every project I ever worked on, led, or consulted with experienced. Some adopted the curious First Customer Shipped metric, which insisted that the project was done when the first customer's order was free on board a truck. Others presumed that the project had successfully tested fixes for and integrated all critical bug reports. In actual experience, though, the project team inevitably continued their efforts long after the designated completion date, for that first customer, upon receiving the first instance of the final product, would experience unanticipated difficulties that only the development team could resolve and additional critical bugs would emerge even after testing and integration were successfully completed. Eventually, the end product would be more or less integrated into the finished product maintenance stream, though members of the original development team might only partially divorce themselves from the product.

I learned that whatever the product developed, it never left a state of becoming.

Tags: #CluelessSummer #PureSchmaltz, #GoodNuff