Quotes About Software Development

Over the years of developing software, I have ran across a number of quotes and saying that resonated with me and this is my curated collection.

"It’s hardware that makes a machine fast.

It’s software that makes a fast machine slow. "

"Keep software soft."

"The parts you can hit with a hammer is hardware. The parts you can only curse at is software."

"Deleted code can’t have any bugs."

"Adding developers to a late project, makes it even later."

"There is nothing quite so permanent as a quick fix."

"Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. "

"When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove the defective code. "

"Anyone can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand."

"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building process by weight."

"Before software can be reusable,

it first has to be usable."

"There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors."

"engineering is making what you need from things you can get."

"A mediocre developer who loves their job tends to be better for the team than an excellent developer who hates it."

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

"We can’t let ‘best’ be the enemy of ‘better’ code."

"Always leave the code better than when you found it."

"You have to remember a good employee is always two weeks away from their next job."

"If you think good design is expensive,

you should look at the cost of bad design."

"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer unusable."

"All statistic models are wrong, but some are useful."

"a good compromise leaves everyone just a little unhappy"

tldw – In 1989, the crew of United Airlines Flight 232 faced an impossible situation, it lost all hydraulics on a triple redundant DC-10 airplane. Afterwards hundreds of others attempted the situation in simulators and no one did a better job than the team that was flying that day. The crew did a great job distributing the tasks and accepting new information as they found out more.

tldw – most people look at the great planes built by Lockheed Martin Skunkworks as 100% successful but the truth is those planes were seriously flawed. The team got started working in giant tent next to a smelly plastic factory, thus the name skunk works. The SR-71 Blackbird is the world’s fastest plane but it can’t start its own engines, it used two Buick wildcat engines on a start cart, it can’t take off with much fuel due to weight and the fact that it leaks fuel until the plane gets up to temperature. The teams spent everything they had on the most important things that it needed to do and left the rest with just passable solutions.