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My washing machine refreshed my thinking on software estimation

I recently had a saga with a washing machine that reminded me why one of the most feared and hated tasks for software developers starts with the question: “So how long will it take you to build that?”

1) Our well-used task-running framework we were going to use for a relatively small part of the system is totally unmaintained now and we'd have to fork it to make it fit for purpose again. 2) Our entire development tooling ecosystem was obsoleted 18 months after the last time we did this, so we're going to be learning the sharp edges of a whole new toolchain from scratch. Yes, we can (and must) gather requirements as best we can, but at some point we’ll end up on the ground and battling dozens of blockers we didn’t expect to hit, even when we thought the territory looked very familiar and a 10 minute job turns into 4 hours.

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