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One More Feature

Matt Schellhas
3 min readDec 31, 2024

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Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

I’ve seen some stuff that you would not believe.

I’ve seen credit card numbers and social security numbers sitting side by side in plain text.
I’ve seen OCaml and Lisp and Haskell used in production.
I’ve encountered bugs where it really was the compiler’s fault.
I’ve seen 10000 line interface definitions.
I’ve seen a coworker break into a bank with a clipboard.
I’ve seen UUID collisions and a decent UI for git and a company who thought it’d be a good idea to save money by making their own database.

Okay. Some of that stuff you totally believe… The point is that coming up on 30 years working in tech, I’ve seen some stuff.

At this point it’s noteworthy when I haven’t seen something. Like that one last feature which will finally close a deal.

You don’t need thirty years in tech to have seen this one.

Sales comes to engineering with this urgent demand. Feature X is a huge priority. We need to build it as soon as possible. It will unlock untold riches from this big customer. Some Product Manager or Engineering leader buys it, so Feature X becomes priority number one. Everyone drops what they’re doing. Weeks to months go by and engineering gets it done. Feature X is now available!

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Matt Schellhas
Matt Schellhas

Written by Matt Schellhas

Dour, opinionated leader of software engineers.

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