The beauty of packing crates
Fortunately I had a lot of time to prepare in advance for moving house. During the five years that I was in my previous apartment I had accumulated more junk than I realized. I threw out stuff for days, hardly able to believe some of the garbage that I had decided to keep and store like a pack rat against the day that I might need it. At the same time, I went down to the store and bought about thirty clear plastic storage crates with green lids. I started packing and organizing everything into these crates. One crate was for cables, one crate for archived paperwork, one crate for photos, one crate for CDs and one crate for correspondence. Several crates were required for old love letters.

There are lots of advantages to these crates. First of all, they look nice. That's important because I might choose to simply store the crate in my new apartment rather than unpack it. Second, the crates are consistent. They're all the same, so you can stack them up high. Third, the crates are clear. You can see the contents of the crate without having to open it or search through ten other crates to get to what you're looking for. Finally, the crates have handles and are easy to carry and move.

Cardboard boxes just don't compare to the crates. Cardboard boxes look tatty, you can't tell what's inside them without opening them, and they tend to be different sizes and shapes, making them harder to stack. Usually someone has written the contents of the box on the outside, but the contents have since changed. Cardboard boxes have a temporary feel to them, which isn't a good thing if you want to feel settled and complete in your new home.

Source code full of cardboard boxes
Too many Lotus Domino applications, when you look inside them at the source code and architecture, are full of cardboard boxes. Cardboard boxes of all shapes and sizes, labeled in an inconsistent way, stacked poorly, some half empty, some overloaded, generally tatty looking and inconsistent. No thought put into the whole, just a bunch of stuff slammed together. Finding what you want is an ordeal, often requiring you to go hunting through ten boxes before finding what it is that you're looking for. In the meantime, you've had to un-stack and pull the whole mess apart, and then you need to put it back together.