It always takes longer than you think it will

Looking back over some old posts I wrote I found this one, dated 8 January 2007:

Doing a ground-up rewrite of Cheetah in Ruby would be a daunting task and far beyond me. But writing something which does only the basic operations I want, nothing more, and addresses the problems I have with Cheetah, could probably be done in a few days. This has a much narrower scope than Cheetah, it is only really intended for compiling and filing static templates (to produce help documentation).

Then follows a chain of status updates (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9) and about 187 revisions (Subversion commits) later, on 12 April 2007 I finally wrote:

It turns out that what started out as a simple project ended up becoming quite a bit more complex.

Isn’t that always the way?