So we have this über-secret project we’re working on, right? Something big and crazy and world-changing and all that stuff. I could go on but, well, no, I can’t. We have a date set in the semi-distant future for that and it’ll come. But one night while I’m working on that, or something else, I forget, I’m doing something in the dirty internals of the system and notice that I can see when programs are started and stopped and so forth. I kind of knew I could get that, but seeing it there in front of me made it so tempting.

When you’re launching a new project, there comes a point when you begin to realize that things are bigger than you ever expected them to be. It’s real easy to say “we just need to clean up that code, get a web site and a web server, and we’re good!” But then you realize that some code can’t be easily sanitized, that it’s hard to find web designers who will come into a project already nearing its deadline, that finding a web server and getting it co-located isn’t a trivial matter.