Conformance vs Comprehension

In 1991, a young student from Finland changed the world. In the mid-1990s I lead a team working on software configuration management tools for IBM — loosely an on-prem, pre-internet GitHub, with version control, issue tracking, and continuous integration. Overly ambitious for its time; trivial by today's standards — in no small part because that same student from Finland came back in 2005 and…