The Master Builder, Unleashed

There is a particular kind of pain in software work: sitting in a meeting about a thing you already know how to build. Not vaguely. Not optimistically. You can see the first version. You can see the shape of the data, the awkward part of the UI, the one integration that will probably hurt, the test that should exist before anyone trusts it, the part that can be ugly for a week, and the part that must be right from the beginning. The work is not done, but the form is already present in your head.