On October 1, 2003, Microsoft announced that it would release its security fixes on a fixed monthly schedule. The day became known as Patch Tuesday, the second Tuesday of each month. Microsoft said “patch timing was the number one customer request.”
Today more than 100 security fixes in one month is common. Fixes that cannot wait are released “out-of-band.”
The customers did not ask for software without flaws. They asked to know when the fixes would come.
In 1992 the American programmer Ward Cunningham introduced a metaphor at a software conference: “Shipping first-time code is like going into debt.” A little debt speeds development, he wrote, as long as it is paid back promptly. “The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid.”
Technical debt is now a standard term in software teams. Often the shortcut is taken on purpose, and the cost of fixing it later is counted as interest. In Cunningham’s words: “Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt.”
The saying is credited to Bert Lance, budget director under President Jimmy Carter. In May 1977 the magazine Nation’s Business quoted him: “That’s the trouble with government: Fixing things that aren’t broken and not fixing things that are broken.”
Lance did not invent the phrase. An aviation journal used “If it Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It” as an article title in September 1962. In 1976 a bank president quoted in the Atlanta Constitution called it “an old Cajun saying.”
In August 2025 the U.S. Office of Personnel Management still credited Lance. It explained the meaning: “effect change where required, but not to re-invent the wheel.”
Extreme Programming, an American software method, has a rule with a blunt name: YAGNI, “You aren’t gonna need it.” Ron Jeffries, one of its founders, wrote in 1998: “Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you need them.”
The rule supports another practice of the method: “do the simplest thing that could possibly work.” Kent Beck’s book Extreme Programming Explained uses the acronym.
In 1960 the Food and Drug Administration hired Frances Kelsey to review applications for new drugs. One of her first files was an application for thalidomide. Kelsey refused it because the safety evidence was “more anecdotal than clinical.” The company resubmitted it again and again and complained to her superiors. They backed her.
Reports of birth defects then came from Europe. In August 1962 President Kennedy gave Kelsey the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service. The Kefauver-Harris Amendments of the same year required manufacturers to “prove the effectiveness of drug products before they go on the market.”
Here the country honored the official who refused to act before the evidence was in.
In his inaugural address on January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy listed the tasks ahead of the country. Then he said: “All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.”
The motto of California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo is Discere Faciendo, “Learn by Doing.” The university was founded in 1901. The motto appeared on campus in 1930. The earlier slogan was “Earn while you learn.”
The school’s first director, Leroy Anderson, wrote that “all instruction should be as largely as possible through the medium of actual performance by the pupils themselves.”
In 1982 Tom Peters and Robert Waterman published In Search of Excellence. They listed eight attributes of excellent companies. The first was “A bias for action.” A report in the Christian Science Monitor that December summed up the authors’ view: “Experimenting and acting on an idea is much better than being paralyzed by proposals or fear of change.”
In a note for a later edition, the authors explained the phrase: “In its simplest terms, this says ‘get out there and try something.'” They added: “Just as you don’t learn anything in science without experimenting, you don’t learn anything in business without trying, failing, and trying again.”
In Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Indiana Jones learns that the Ark has been loaded onto a truck to Cairo, guarded by a convoy. He says he is going after it. His friend Sallah asks: “How?” Indy answers: “I don’t know. I’m making this up as I go.”
Bill Walsh, head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, wrote down the opening plays of each game in advance. The list grew “from the first five, to first 10, and finally First 15.” According to Lowell Cohn, who wrote a book about Walsh, the reason was “purely diagnostic.” Walsh “would test the defense in various ways.”
The script was not a plan to follow at any cost. Quarterback Steve Young said “it wasn’t a cause for alarm that we didn’t run through the First 15.” NFL teams still script their opening plays. Kansas City Chiefs coordinator Matt Nagy says the script helps them “understand maybe what [the defense is] going to do.”