I like rock music. And I love live performances. Well, you know, studio albums provide a great sound quality and the cure of small acoustic details. But songs registered during a tour are on another planet.

Because a song evolves during time. It is never played in the same way twice. In some cases, it is completely different, with another rhythm, other arrangements or with a new guitar solo. There may be some small imperfections but they are quickly forgiven by the energy provided by the musicians. And eventually there is the interaction with the public that sings and claps.

The first release of a software is just like a studio version of a song. It's perfect, right? It has a wonderful structure, meaningful variable names and good comments before each function. Then the testers find some bugs and slightly your code starts to change. Then the project manager asks you to modify the behavior of a particular dialog. Then the customers want to add new functions. Eventually the code becomes a mess and you do the refactoring.

If you try to execute git blame on your code at this point, you'll find that more than 50% of the functions have been changed since the initial release. But this is not a problem. It's tested, reviewed and appreciated by users. Now your software is absolutely better. Just like a good song played live.

Cover image by Tony Morelli taken from Wikimedia Commons licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.