When Nothing Seems to Help...
When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
I first read this quote from Jacob Riis in an article about the way the San Antonio Spurs front office builds a perennial contender for the NBA championship.
I later learnt that Jacob Riis was a journalist and a social documentary photographer that covered and fought against the living conditions of the poorest New York citizens.
I sometimes think about this quote when I develop software. Every line of code, every commit is a blow at the rock. It takes many of them without noticeable changes before the rock is split and the software is finally released.