Quotes About Development

once gotos are introduced, they spread through the code like termites through a rotting house.

usually more time is spent in making good-looking presentation slides than in improving the quality of the software.

Copy and paste is a design error

Choose your battles. If rapid development is truly top priority, don't shackle your developers by insisting on too many priorities at once.

Don't differentiate routine names solely by number. One developer wrote all his code in one big function. Then he took every 15 lines and created functions named Part1, Part2, and so on. After that, he created one high-level function that called each part.

One of the paradoxes of defensive programming is that during development, you'd like an error to be noticeable—you'd rather have it be obnoxious than risk overlooking it. But during production, you'd rather have the error be as unobtrusive as possible, to have the program recover or fail gracefully.

Spend your time on the 20 percent of the refactorings that provide 80 percent of the benefit.

Building software implies various stages of planning, preparation and execution that vary in kind and degree depending on what's being built. [...] Building a four-foot tower requires a steady hand, a level surface, and 10 undamaged beer cans. Building a tower 100 times that size doesn't merely require 100 times as many beer cans.

Managing complexity is the most important technical topic in software development. In my view, it's so important that Software's Primary Technical Imperative has to be managing complexity. Complexity is not a new feature of software development.

People who are effective at developing high-quality software have spent years accumulating dozens of techniques, tricks, and magic incantations. The techniques are not rules; they are analytical tools.

Teaching helped sharpen your own skills.

study by Phillippa Lally and her research team showed it takes 66 days to create a brand-new routine.

Step #2: Focus on One Habit at a Time

The best way to make a permanent change is to focus on daily, incremental improvements.

this early learning of how to do things one tiny little step at a time. I learned to not worry so much about the outcome, but to concentrate on the step I was on and to try to do it as perfectly as I could when I was doing it.

And thanks to all those science projects, I acquired a central ability that was to help me through my entire career: patience.

I acquired a central ability that was to help me through my entire career: patience. I'm serious. Patience is usually so underrated. I mean, for all these projects, from third grade all the way to eighth grade, I just learned things gradually, figuring out how to put electronic devices together without so much as cracking a book ... I learned to not worry so much about the outcome, but to concentrate on the step I was on and to try to do it as perfectly as I could when I was doing it.

He took the time—a lot of time—to show me those few little things. They were little things to him, even though Fairchild and Texas Instruments had just developed the transistor only a decade earlier.

The principal is competing against yourself. It's about self-improvement about being better than you were the day before.

Without a doubt, water is an annual's number one need.

Chapter the Eleventh: In Which the Plot, Behaving in Much the Manner Of a Soup to which Corn Starch Has been Added, Begins, at Last, to Thicken.

Any point in a process looks like the process was leading up to it if that's as far as you've gotten.

You can't put something together again unless you've torn it apart first.

For example, the client who values education might be asked, "What if you received the education, but no one knew. Would that still be of importance?