Quotes from Andrew Hunt

A Pragmatic Programmer takes charge of his or her own career, and isn't afraid to admit ignorance or error.

Before you start to look at the bug, make sure that you are working on code that built cleanly—without warnings. We routinely set compiler warning levels as high as possible. It doesn't make sense to waste time trying to find a problem that the computer could find for you! We need to concentrate on the harder problems at hand.

The best way to start fixing a bug is to make it reproducible. After all, if you can't reproduce it, how will you know if it is ever fixed?

it is up to you to provide solutions, not excuses.

Don't rely on the properties of things you can't control.

Entropy is a term from physics that refers to the amount of disorder in a system.

An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. • Benjamin Franklin

Often this is an orthogonality issue. When teams are organized with lots of overlap, members are confused about responsibilities. Every change needs a meeting of the entire team, because any one of them might be affected.

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.

Pragmatic Programmers won't sit idly by and watch their projects fall apart through neglect.

You have the right not to take on a responsibility for an impossible situation

There are other factors that can contribute to software rot, and we'll touch on some of them elsewhere, but neglect accelerates the rot faster than any other factor.

it is equally unprofessional to promise impossible time scales and to cut basic engineering corners to meet a deadline.

The greatest of all weakness is the fear of appearing week.

Don't be a slave to any notation;

We frequently hear software development leaders tell their staff, "We should operate like Netflix" (or one of these other leading companies). Of course you could do that. First, get yourself a few hundred thousand servers and tens of millions of users...

Requirements are not architecture. Requirements are not design, nor are they the user interface. Requirements are need.

People find it easier to join an ongoing success. Show them a glimpse of the future and you'll get them to rally around.

Let the computer do the repetitious, the mundane—it will do a better job of it than we would. We've got more important and more difficult things to do.

Kaizen is a Japanese term that captures the concept of continuously making many small improvements. It was considered to be one of the main reasons for the dramatic gains in productivity and quality in Japanese manufacturing and was widely copied throughout the world. Kaizen applies to individuals, too. Every day, work to refine the skills you have and to add new tools to your repertoire.

Pragmatic Programmers are different. We are driven to find our bugs now, so we don't have to endure the shame of others finding our bugs later.

It is a painful thing To look at your own trouble and know That you yourself and no one else has made it • Sophocles, Ajax

Over the years, you'll be amazed at how your experience has blossomed and your skills have grown.

At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial challenge roughly comparable to herding cats. • The Washington Post Magazine, June 9, 1985 So