Quotes About Development

We develop features before infrastructure and frequently show those features to stakeholders.

As they added more and more features, the code got worse and worse until they simply could not manage it any longer. It was the bad code that brought the company down.

Programming is so hard, in fact, that it is beyond the capability of one person to do it well. No matter how skilled you are, you will certainly benefit from another programmer's thoughts and ideas.

Code formatting is about communication, and communication is the professional developer's first order of business.

highway through the middle of a small town that anticipates growth? Who would want such a road through their town? It is a myth that we can get systems "right the first time." Instead, we should implement only today's stories, then refactor and expand the system to implement new stories tomorrow.

Programming is an act of creation. When we write code we are creating something out of nothing. We are boldly imposing order upon chaos.

You can't make a reusable framework until you first make a usable framework. Reusable frameworks require that you build them in concert with several reusing applications.

Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing is well over 10 to 1. We are constantly reading old code as part of the effort to write new code. ...[Therefore,] making it easy to read makes it easier to write.

It is not the language that makes programs appear simple. It is the programmer that make the language appear simple!

You are reading this book for two reasons. First, you are a programmer. Second, you want to be a better programmer. Good. We need better programmers.

Why do most developers fear to make continuous changes to their code? They are afraid they'll break it! Why are they afraid they'll break it? Because they don't have tests.

Perhaps you thought that "getting it working" was the first order of business for a professional developer. I hope by now, however, that this book has disabused you of that idea. The functionality that you create today has a good chance of changing in the next release, but the readability of your code will have a profound effect on all the changes that will ever be made.

The internal developmental process was always connected in Lenin's mind with external events, in particular with the prospects of assistance resulting from worker revolutions in other countries. "The complete victory of socialist revolution is unthinkable in one country," he said on November 8, 1918.

It had taken about two centuries for the feudal system of economy to show its superiority over the slave system, Stalin said, and about a hundred years or less for the bourgeois system to prove its superiority over feudal economy. Because technological progress had now greatly accelerated the pace of development and change, however, the socialist system of economy could advance with "giant strides" and out-perform capitalism in a much shorter period.

Not only was he appealing to the urge prevalent in the party to concentrate attention and effort on the tasks of Soviet development, he was hinting that a fully socialist economy could be created in a comparatively short time.

eighteen-forties and fifties

His rebelliousness began to appear in the first of the two schools, flared up strongly soon after he entered the second, and continued to develop. By the time he left the seminary in 1899 he was a committed revolutionary, in revolt against that great punitive system of paternalistic authority known as tsarism.

The First Decade

teleological engineering.

The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting.

the goal of an apprenticeship is not money, a good position, a title, or a diploma, but rather the transformation of your mind and character—the first transformation on the way to mastery. You

First, it is essential that you begin with one skill that you can master, and that serves as a foundation for acquiring others. You must avoid at all cost the idea that you can manage learning several skills at a time.

It is the height of stupidity to believe that in the course of your short life, your few decades of consciousness, you can somehow rewire the configurations of your brain through technology and wishful thinking, overcoming the effect of six million years of development. To go against the grain might bring temporary distraction, but time will mercilessly expose your weakness and impatience.

When people choose between talk about the past and talk about the future, a pragmatic person will always opt for the future and forget the past.