Lessons in Jugaad

This article from the New York Times is great.

Here are a few takeaways which translate from the world of space exploration on the cheap, to web development.

1. "Ours is a contrasting, inexpensive and innovative approach to the very complex mission...Yet it is a technically well-conceived and designed mission." : Doing things quickly and cheaply does not have to sacrifice forethought and careful planning.

2. "If necessity is the mother of invention, constraint is the mother of frugal innovation." : To what extent is it possible to look at the limitations imposed by the project timeline as a catalyst for creative problem solving?

3. "India's 'late beginner' advantage was that it could learn from earlier mission failures." : When others have tried and failed, we can look to those experiences as lessons. Where others have succeeded, we can also leverage those existing Open Source code bases.

4. "The building blocks are kept the same so we don't have to tailor-make for each mission...Also, we have a ready backup if a system fails." : Similar to number 3 above, how do plugins, modules, etc. that already exist, benefit developers as re-usable components? This probably seems obvious.