Open source awesomeness

The first thing I do before accepting a task or job is to figure out what I am up against. It wasn't always this way. As a young engineer working on communications systems, I was once asked to lead the development of a specification for a subsystem that sounded cool. Woo hoo – a time to shine! I committed based on the sales pitch that the team lead provided. Reality hit me sometime around the second week in the task, as it was only then that I could look up from my keyboard to envision the remaining path ahead of me. Had I done that research ahead of my commitment, I could have avoided the trouble that was ahead of me. Needless to say, the job got done, but I always look back and wonder how much better it could have been and how much happier and better rested I would have been had I researched the process, constraints, and expectations before...