Sand Mandala

The Sand Mandala (tib: kilkhor) is a Tibetan Buddhist tradition involving the creation and destruction of mandalas made from colored sand. A sand mandala is ritualistically destroyed once it has been completed and its accompanying ceremonies and viewing are finished to symbolize the Buddhist doctrinal belief in the transitory nature of material life.

Feels a lot like building software, one may spend days, weeks, or moths working on a feature, only to be told by the customer that is its "not what he really needs" and one needs to start over. If one attaches to much to the feature one may even fight to keep it on the system, even when it does not really make business sense... maybe all developers should learn to make sand mandalas and destroy them (it would certainly help me)

Same thing happens with iterative development, you build a minimal system "ready to be deployed" in the first interation, only to refactory it mercilessly and add features (and maybe drop some) and adjust the architecture to match the information that you have now, and you iterate and iterate, until finally, the underlying technology becomes obsolete (like D.O.S is now) and you have drop it and start over in a different language and platform. You have you realize that software is alwasy in flux, and is one of the best examples of a transitory thing.

Another moment when it is good to remember the transitory nature of things is when a project is cancelled, even when in my experience, most of the time, that happens not because of a technological problem, but because of political problems, one can not feel but think that if one had used the technology in a better way, there could have been a way to save the project. But things always change, and the project (even the successful ones), sooner or later, are going to become obsolete and canceled, so the sooner we learn about the transitory nature of everything that we create, the better.