On the state of software development in general & coming to terms with having a lot of loose ends

This week I was pondering the question why the trade of software development seems to be ever more digressing to be a Red Queen's race. Maybe my perception, that it wasn't always like this, is just plain wrong. One example: I find the state of rapid application development tools to be quite lacking and I certainly hope that Visual Basic 6 will not remain pinnacle of RAD, but I see no single integrated solution for a painless, quick, local evaluation of an idea.

I've also thought a bit about how a both practical and principle-oriented introduction to software development would have to look like. Could I outline what I think to be essential? I tried and ended up with a whole lot of disparate, little aspects - it is really alarmingly easy to miss the forest for the trees. I sense that there is a lot of potential for simplification overall, but as the saying goes: simplicity is the ultimate sophistication...

Another ongoing topic of mine is coming to terms with a lot of parallel ideas and loose ends. I've started thinking in the direction of serving on-going writing in a separate folder as raw plain text. That would be quite frictionless, but it I have to make up my mind about a few details. Would I want to keep URLs of such draft/work-in-progress files stable, shall they be first-class citizens of the site, should they be indexed, how would I indicate freshness/state etc.? Also I started to think about a general restructuring of the site. After all, I've strayed away from my initial principle, that every piece of content shall live in the index.html.

And - third time's the charm - this weeknote format seems to be working for me and my schedule.