I’m a developer!
One of the things that I would like to shout on various occasions is: "I'm a developer! Not first line support!"
The downside for working for a small company is that all the phone calls and emails almost always get directly to me and the majority is first line support work (assign rights, explaining the user how to do something and on some terrible occasions I sometimes have to do the user his work for him). Now I don't the social part of my work, but I have always taken pride in what I do and that is developing, writing code et cetera. And when I'm doing that I don't want people calling me or except me to deliver support directly especially when it is something trivial like assigning rights. There is a perfectly fine right management system in the application, so please, ask your supervisor to grant you more rights instead of calling me.
As I said I don't mind the social part of my work, I even enjoy it, but my main task is to deliver the next quality product as soon as possible and for that I need silence and absolute focus. I always like to think that developers are similar to god. Where god, according to the bible, created the universe and everything in it, I create software. Now imagine how god would be if after the second day (his schedule of seven days) someone came up to him and said: "Well look here god, see that water?" as he pointed to the blue oceans, "Yes, well here is the problem, I don't like that color. Could you make it blue?". Personally I would throw a lighting bolt like Zeus does and ask him (post-mortem) to just send me a mail next time.
I just wish that some people would just send me a mail instead of calling me when it's not important. Now I'm really starting to dislike phones, in fact I'm afraid that each call might be for me 
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Image from: Peter Alfred Hess on flickr. The following rights apply on the image: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
Never release poor quality!
One of the rules I have adopted is that I will never (if the choice is mine to make) release poor quality software/games/code/content/etc. I hate that rule with a passion even though I use it constantly. The reason why I hate it is because I often promise to release some code in the near future but then decide I would rather break my promise than release poor quality.
The reason why I don't want to release poor quality code can be summarized as followed:
- Improving the quality of an existing product is hard. If anyone (me included) would use my code then there is good chance that some of the poorer quality rubs off on the other code, making the final product of lower quality.
- Never feed a critic except his own words. I can't and won't recall the amount of times that I complained about some piece of code written by myself or others. If I complain about the code, why wouldn't others?
- Poor craftmanships reflects poorly.
- Releasing poor quality once, sets a precedent to lower the bar the next time you need to release something
And for those reasons only a shocking 10% of my work is released and that excludes any projects that I write pure for testing. When I look at my blog I know that I have more drafts (articles I wrote, but never posted) than actually posted articles.
So if you were ever wondering when I would release the code, then there is good chance that I won't. And for that I'm sorry. (but frankly you should be glad I don't release it 
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