WordPress tells me there are 55 posts on this blog, of which 8 are drafts. 15% drafts. This will not do.

In the world of software development, there is a concept of technical debt, and an implied concept of technical bankruptcy. It’s not a pretty concept, since you can’t actually declare bankruptcy and have others absorb the loss. It usually means an expensive rewrite, losing features, introducing bugs, changing interfaces, pissing off users. It commonly kills projects.

I’m not willing to let this project die, so I am abandoning some drafts in order to move on to things I can actually do, right now.

I was once described as “a 25-year-old who, despite his best efforts, [was] not yet 30.” This is my problem; I make the perfect the enemy of the good, and try to do too much. Mostly, the posts I am dropping relate to places where I failed in some way–I screwed up–and I haven’t fixed it. And maybe I’m not going to.

I’m not perfect, and I’m not supposed to be (whatever “supposed to” means,) but shouldn’t I always be trying? When is giving up acceptable (Whatever “acceptable” means?) Someone challenged me today on my mantra that “compromise must always be temporary; permanent compromise is failure.”

Maybe this is what forgiveness is about? I screwed up, I can’t or won’t fix it[1], and forgiveness is being OK with that? This or that compromise is permanent, and I forgive it for being so?

There’s no page on the wiki for Forgiveness. I think one needs to exist.

[1] – “Can’t” and “won’t” are a subject of perennial debate for me. I’m about 95% convinced that if someone didn’t do something, then they couldn’t; if they could have, they would have. That’s a topic for another blog post.