Archive for January, 2010

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• 7.21.10 “Usability is the quality of a system that makes it easy to learn, easy to use, easy to remember, error tolerant, and subjectively pleasing.” — Usability First, http://www.usabilityfirst.com/about-usability/introduction-to-user-centered-design/
• 7.19.10 “The only possible response… isn’t.” — Seth Godin, http://sethgodin.typepad.com
• 5.11.10 “The Art of Programming is doing one !@%^$ thing at a time.” — Michael Feathers, Twitter, 5/11/2010
• 1.14.10 “Be productive, be fantastically clever when necessary, speak truth to power, hit your dates, and don’t ship crap.” — Rands in Repose, @rands
• 12.31.09 “Refactoring is the act of improving code that has already been improved.” — Andrew Glover, In pursuit of code quality
• 12.18.09 “Test-driven development is a way of managing fear during programming.” — Kent Beck, Test-Driven Development by Example
• 12.14.09 “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” — Gandalf the Grey, J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring”
• 12.10.09 “Even perfect program verification can only establish that a program meets its specification…. Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.” — Fred Brooks, No Silver Bullet
• 11.30.09 “Understandability is next to godliness.” — Martin Fowler, Refactoring
• 11.23.09 “For years, software development was an entire subdivision of badly painted houses.” — Jeff Atwood, codinghorror.com
• 11.22.09 “Remember that your code is for a human first and a computer second. Humans need good names. Take note of when you have spent ages trying to do something that would have been easier if a couple of methods had been better named. Good naming is a skill that requires practice; improving this skill is [...]
• 11.7.09 “Even so the program works. Is this not just an aesthetic judgment, a dislike of ugly code? It is until we want to change the system. The compiler doesn’t care whether the code is ugly or clean. But when we change the system, there is a human involved, and humans do care. A poorly designed [...]
• 8.25.09 “When people say that pair programming reduces productivity, I answer ‘that would be true if the most time consuming part of programming was typing.’” — Martin Fowler
• 7.29.09 “If you never think about programming after 5:01pm, you probably shouldn’t be a programmer.” — Neal Enssle
• 5.2.09 “Excuses sound like they feel.” — Rands in Repose
• 5.24.08 “There is No CODE That is More Flexible Than NO Code!” — Brad Appleton
• 3.12.08 “All methodologies are based on fear.” — Kent Beck
• 12.14.06 “The problem is that while logic is a powerful and effective programming tool, it is a pathetically weak and inappropriate interaction design tool.” — Alan Cooper
• 11.15.06 “Learning is limited by an organization’s ability to keep its people.” — Tom DeMarco
• 10.24.06 “People under time pressure don’t think faster.” — Tom Lister
• 8.17.06 “The ultimate metric that I would like to propose for user friendliness is quite simple: if this system was a person, how long would it take before you punched it in the nose?” — Tom Carey
• 8.14.06 “The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.” — Robert R. Coveyou
• 8.12.06 “The evolution of languages: FORTRAN is a non-typed language. C is a weakly typed language. Ada is a strongly typed language. C++ is a strongly hyped language.” — Ron Sercely
• 8.11.06 “Managing senior programmers is like herding cats.” — Dave Platt
• 8.9.06 “Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.” — Ralph Johnson
• 8.8.06 “Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.” — Bruce Brown
• 8.7.06 “Java is C++ without the guns, knives, and clubs.” — James Gosling
• 8.6.06 “As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn’t as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding [...]
• 7.26.06 “I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.” — Stephen Hawking
• 7.24.06 “It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.” — David St. Hubbins, This is Spinal Tap