THEORY: It is impossible to 'Do your best'...
I have thought about this for some time now and decided to write it down and let people tell me how ludicrous my theory is….
I believe that it is not possible to ‘Do your best’ when it comes to developing an application. I think this because as developers we are constantly evolving in our skill sets. Even within the scope of a small, say 4-6 week project; we have learned things by the end of the 6 weeks that make us better than when we started. Thus, to do our best we would need to re-code the things done at the project outset and then at the end of the re-write we would once again be in the same boat. This is all said with the unrealistic consideration that I asked for 10-12 weeks for the project, when I really needed 18-24 and the client only gave me 4-6.
So in order to truly ‘Do your best’ on a project, there would need to be no deadline (thus an unlimited budget) and you would have to do the entire project without learning anything new or knowing of any possible way that any line of code could work better!
Translation: This just ain’t gonna happen in the real world!
So – the next time you complete a project, don’t say ‘I did my best!’