Name your favorite guilty pleasure.
Cheez-Its.

I respect Jack quite a bit but this puts it over the top for me.

“Can I take some time to clean up this code? It is horrendous.” The answer should always be yes to this question. However, often times we find ourselves up against walls in the form of budgets, time, due dates and expectation and so the typical “powers that be” at companies often veto the request. My advice to you, dear developer, is to never ask for permission for things you know are vital to your work.

You know your work environment better than I do so perhaps you can ask this question and immediately have the full support of your team. Sad to say that many aren’t so fortunate. They’ll ask their boss if they can take some time to clean up their code, make it efficient and extensible and, while the boss may recognize the need for such tasks, ultimately the boss will simply say “maybe we can do that later”.

Why is this the typical reaction? Because bosses don’t have to read, edit and support the code.

This is folly and every developer knows it. Bosses, (if you’re reading this) putting off a few hours worth of code clean-up now will only turn into many hours or days in the future. So by allowing your developers time to do this much needed code maintenance you’re actually saving your company money. But don’t worry – they’re not going to ask you for permission anymore. They’re just going to do it.

Update: Now I’m finding myself wishing they answered the question. Tumblr and its “no comments” grumble grumble.

One could sit back and try to analyze why this is happening; with Twitter as Pownce’s main “competitor” (whether justly so or not) and with Pownce having a reasonable amount of uptime problems – you could say this is a result of these two, or many other things.  But I’m less worried about the “why” and more interested in the “what’s next”?

That is why I asked Mike Malone, one of the Pownce team members that is moving to Six Apart, to answer two simple questions (which he was happy to do).

Leah said, in the blog post announcement, that “we’ll come back with something much better in 2009″ – Does this mean that Pownce will come back as a better service? Or, something completely different?

“It is going to come back as something “very cool and very different”. [...] Whether it will be called “Pownce” is to be determined.”

Pownce seems fairly active still. Is there any direct benefit to shutting the service down within two weeks?

“The benefit is basically that we can concentrate on the new projects we’re working on.”

After asking Mike to elaborate on the second answer, he stated that it is generally tough to keep Pownce up and running and takes up a lot of time.  Shutting the service helps them to free up their time in order to focus their efforts on getting, what they feel, is a really valuable new service up and running quicker than they could have without shutting Pownce down.

Pownce, although I really liked the service, never really made it into my daily stops insomuch as other services like Twitter, Brightkite, and FriendFeed have.  So I can’t say I’m particularly saddened about its being shut down.  However, I do look forward to Six Apart and the ex-Pownce team creating something new and exciting in the New Year that hopefully will be a more focused and stable product to use.

Thanks to Mike for answering my questions.