Things you should never do

Joel Spolksy has a great series of posts about the netscape project moving from version 4 to version 6 and the major mistakes they made along the way.

Among my favorite from the articles:

There's a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming:

It’s harder to read code than to write it.