Work & Skills

“No one in the brief history of computing has ever written a piece of perfect software. It’s unlikely that you’ll be the first.”

“All software you write will be tested—if not by you and your team, then by the eventual users—so you might as well plan on testing it thoroughly.”

“One hundred years from now, our engineering may seem as archaic as the techniques used by medieval cathedral builders seem to today’s civil engineers, while our craftsmanship will still be honored.”

“We can be proud of our abilities, but we must own up to our shortcomings, our ignorances and our mistakes.”

“There is no such thing as a best solution, be it a tool, a language, or an operating system. There can only be systems that are more appropriate in a particular set of circumstances.”

“Great software today is often preferable to perfect software tomorrow. If you give your users something to play with early, their feedback will often lead you to a better eventual solution.”

“Developers who don’t actively think about their code are programming by coincidence—the code might work, but there’s no particular reason why.”

“One broken window — a badly designed piece of code, a poor management decision that the team must live with for the duration of the project — is all it takes to start the decline. If you find yourself working on a project with quite a few broken windows, it’s all too easy to slip into the mindset of ‘All the rest of this code is crap, I’ll just follow suit.’”

“While software development is immune from almost all physical laws, entropy hits us hard.”

“In an abstract sense, an application is successful if it correctly implements its specifications. Unfortunately, this pays only abstract bills. In reality, the success of a project is measured by how well it meets the expectations of its users.”