Over Promise, Under Deliver

published: Thu, 10-Feb-2005   |   updated: Thu, 27-Oct-2005

Silly, I know. I've been a software developer for how long now? And the first thing you tend to learn in being one is that you should under-promise and over-deliver.

That is, at the beginning you should be pessimistic about how much you can actually do in a project and not promise too much. Then, at the end of the project, you deliver more than you'd promised and look like a superstar. (Obviously there are limits to what you can under-promise: you can't for instance say that you'll manage to do nothing and then deliver something at the end because you'll look like an idiot.) Or, because of other resource issues, you just manage (barely) to finish what you promised and still look like a star. The alternative, promising a bundle and failing miserably, just makes you look like a doofus.

Well, in November in a flush of excitement, I announced that I'd got back the copyright to my book and then I said that I'd be able to reprint it by Christmas. Ha, bloody ha. Of course it didn't happen. Typesetting a book is no easy matter. Well, let me rephrase that. It's pretty easy, it just takes a hellish amount of time. (Remember all I have for my book are the original Word files I typed up, one per chapter. I do not have the Ventura Publisher files that Wordware's typesetter produced for the actual physical book.)

So, just to quell any rumors: yes, I am going to reprint the book and, no, I don't know how long it'll take me to get there. I want to do it as soon as possible, but since it gets done in my spare time, I don't know how quickly progress will be made.