Matt Linderman of 37signals posted this today about the essence of refactoring:

“Whether we’re authoring software or prose, rewriting is key. Rewriting is when you turn good into great. It’s true for books, blog posts, marketing copy, interfaces, code, etc. For all of them, we grind it out. We get something down, share it, get feedback, revise, and then do it over again. We get where we’re going via lots of wrong turns.

Sometimes we even throw everything away and start over from scratch. Yeah, that can be frustrating. But if you never throw anything away, you’re holding on to your worst ideas.”

There are a lot of interesting tidbits in the post and I highly recommend reading it over, if for nothing else than the list of quotes they have compiled. Here’s one:

“The worst thing you write is better than the best thing you didn’t write.”

Now I just gotta start revising and rewriting posts to this site and to Alt Text.