A realistic approach to consistency

The issue of consistency can be a very delicate subject; I've seen people express displeasure over how quickly their community and/or workplace forgot their good deeds and contributions of the past. There's a popular ideology that when people err or are unable to perform in the present, their past good deeds and efforts should be remembered and used to cushion the consequences of their current situation. While valid, we have to understand that such a model isn't sustainable.

Nature by and large respects consistency, let's bring it closer to home. If you're reading this, you most likely took a shower and brushed your teeth yesterday, that action doesn't mean your body and teeth will smell and feel fresh 24 hours later, you still have to brush your teeth and take a shower today in order to access the benefits of fresh breath and a clean body. Luckily for some professions like software engineering, due to the ideology of automating recurrent tasks our yesterday's code (when written well) can solve today's challenges while buying us time to develop more futuristic products or upgrade the existing product.

In software development, consistency has to reflect on the performance of your code. It has to consistently do what it's supposed to do. As a result of the fact that software engineering is an exact science, if it works, it should continue to work. However, there are terms known as "logical errors" which refers to the situation where your code compiles and runs because the machine understand what it has been told, however, there are bugs because the logic powering the features of the code are rather inconsistent. This can be a bit of an issue with is which concepts like unit testing are very important and should be adhered to.