Here are some of the great quotes about software development that I have found from around the internet.
If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution.
Robert Sewell
There is only one satisfying way to boot a computer.
J. H. Goldfuss
Computers let you make more mistakes faster than any other human invention, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
Mitch Ratcliffe
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
Andrew S. Tannenbaum
"Somethin like if you throw a bird at two birds they all take a shit or something... Something like that... "
Adam Lamb
If you stop believing in the existence of 'business rules' you might vomit up the kool aid -- spit out the red pill, and do a Gunderloy ;
Leon Bambrick
The real money isn't in the software. It's in the service you build with that software.
Jeff Atwood
Take a clear-eyed view of the competitive landscape and figure out what you have to offer that your offshore competitors don't...
Bob Lewis
If everything is equally important, then nothing is very important.
Michael Bierut
The core skill of the software developer is correctly identifying and solving problems.
Bob on Development
I can hear the sounds of once quiet machinery winding up again, and a patter of feet from the breakroom, eager to work.
Chris Wolney (on a restored email link)
If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality.
Charlie Brooker
Go code something. Go solve a problem.
There has never been a better time to take a shot
Rick Segal
...It's success is guaranteed by the net's very makeup - the net is simply too good at gathering communities of interest, too good at freely distributing content, and too lousy at keeping anything locked inside subscription networks, for it to fail. Like TV, the net is better at getting people to pay attention than anything else.
Clay Shirky
It irritates me that people insist that it's self-evident that OSX is more usable than Windows, as if this were in some way an objective fact, and that all evidence to the contrary can be explained away but every personal anecdote in confirmation is unassailable.
Eric TF Bat
Business needs and feature requirements increase to fill in the productivity gains due to silver bullets.
Haack's Law
Inspire action amongst your comrades by being a model to avoid
Leon Bambrick
...the business analysts knew what they wanted. Buzz-word compliance.
Tim Gallagher
JavaScript: The cutting edge technology of Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V
Eric Pascarello
Rock on, young stunningly-good-looking Management Consultant.
Spolsky on consulting
The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.
Henry Ford
it's the end result of a careful mixture of myth and buzzword
Alex Papadimoulis on Coghead
Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing.
Konrad Lorenz
The apparent point of Apple's existence is to create a beautiful and polished user experience. Well, it turns out that what Apple does is beautiful and polished *graphic design*. Actually interacting with the system is something else.
Ben Bederson
In software, we rarely have meaningful requirements. Even if we do, the only measure of success that matters is whether our solution solves the customer's shifting idea of what their problem is.
Jeff Atwood
Son, better to do lots of mediocre things than one thing that's really good. That way, people will know you were trying, even if you are a little dumb.
DreamHost.com Newsletter
You’ll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
Barnum's Law
a Netscape engineer who shan't be named once passed a pointer to JavaScript, stored it as a string and later passed it back to C, killing 30
Blake Ross
I'd like free CPU cycles too. I just happen to care much more about free developer cycles and am willing to trade the former for the latter.
David Heinemeier Hansson
Most developers who work with MSSCCI eventually turn to recreational pharmaceuticals in a futile effort to cope.
Eric Sink
A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.
anonymous
It's _the_ single worst way to write software, because it by definition means that the software was written to match theory, not reality.
Linus Torvalds on Specs
The best way to predict the future is to implement it.
David Heinemeier Hansson
Test takes full responsibility for paper balls in the office and ruthless acts of paper ball terrorism will continue until our demands are met.
Betsy Aoki
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.
Brian W. Kernighan
They want everyone to learn and use CORBA! That should provide us all with many years of entertainment.
Philip Greenspun
Ironically, after a series of pay cuts, mandatory overtime, and benefits slashing, the email didn't help improve employee morale.
Alex Papadimoulis - The Daily WTF
Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
Barry LePatner
Identify a real need, figure out how to solve it with a minimum number of moving parts and without writing any unnecessary code, and execute it with talent and professionalism.
Mike Gunderloy on Mashups (via Search VB)
Our marketing professionals are constantly coming up with new ways to make you feel inferior and stupid. Because you are. And we're not.
HuhCorp.com
So, Microsoft has relaxed the NDA on Office 12 somewhat - enough that it's safe to say I've had a chance to play with the new user interface and I frankly detest it.
Mike Gunderloy (The Daily Grind)
"When people use the term Web 2.0, I always feel a little bit stupider for the rest of the day."
Joel Spolsky
"This is not to say that design is unnecessary. But after a certain point, design is just speculation."
Philip Chu
"No matter how slick the demo is in rehearsal, when you do it in front of a live audience the probability of a flawless presentation is inversely proportional to the number of people watching, raised to the power of the amount of money involved."
Mark Gibbs
If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution.
Robert Sewell
There is only one satisfying way to boot a computer.
J. H. Goldfuss
Computers let you make more mistakes faster than any other human invention, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
Mitch Ratcliffe
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
Andrew S. Tannenbaum
"Somethin like if you throw a bird at two birds they all take a shit or something... Something like that... "
Adam Lamb
If you stop believing in the existence of 'business rules' you might vomit up the kool aid -- spit out the red pill, and do a Gunderloy ;
Leon Bambrick
The real money isn't in the software. It's in the service you build with that software.
Jeff Atwood
Take a clear-eyed view of the competitive landscape and figure out what you have to offer that your offshore competitors don't...
Bob Lewis
If everything is equally important, then nothing is very important.
Michael Bierut
The core skill of the software developer is correctly identifying and solving problems.
Bob on Development
I can hear the sounds of once quiet machinery winding up again, and a patter of feet from the breakroom, eager to work.
Chris Wolney (on a restored email link)
If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality.
Charlie Brooker
Go code something. Go solve a problem.
There has never been a better time to take a shot
Rick Segal
...It's success is guaranteed by the net's very makeup - the net is simply too good at gathering communities of interest, too good at freely distributing content, and too lousy at keeping anything locked inside subscription networks, for it to fail. Like TV, the net is better at getting people to pay attention than anything else.
Clay Shirky
It irritates me that people insist that it's self-evident that OSX is more usable than Windows, as if this were in some way an objective fact, and that all evidence to the contrary can be explained away but every personal anecdote in confirmation is unassailable.
Eric TF Bat
Business needs and feature requirements increase to fill in the productivity gains due to silver bullets.
Haack's Law
Inspire action amongst your comrades by being a model to avoid
Leon Bambrick
...the business analysts knew what they wanted. Buzz-word compliance.
Tim Gallagher
JavaScript: The cutting edge technology of Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V
Eric Pascarello
Rock on, young stunningly-good-looking Management Consultant.
Spolsky on consulting
The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.
Henry Ford
it's the end result of a careful mixture of myth and buzzword
Alex Papadimoulis on Coghead
Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing.
Konrad Lorenz
The apparent point of Apple's existence is to create a beautiful and polished user experience. Well, it turns out that what Apple does is beautiful and polished *graphic design*. Actually interacting with the system is something else.
Ben Bederson
In software, we rarely have meaningful requirements. Even if we do, the only measure of success that matters is whether our solution solves the customer's shifting idea of what their problem is.
Jeff Atwood
Son, better to do lots of mediocre things than one thing that's really good. That way, people will know you were trying, even if you are a little dumb.
DreamHost.com Newsletter
You’ll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
Barnum's Law
a Netscape engineer who shan't be named once passed a pointer to JavaScript, stored it as a string and later passed it back to C, killing 30
Blake Ross
I'd like free CPU cycles too. I just happen to care much more about free developer cycles and am willing to trade the former for the latter.
David Heinemeier Hansson
Most developers who work with MSSCCI eventually turn to recreational pharmaceuticals in a futile effort to cope.
Eric Sink
A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.
anonymous
It's _the_ single worst way to write software, because it by definition means that the software was written to match theory, not reality.
Linus Torvalds on Specs
The best way to predict the future is to implement it.
David Heinemeier Hansson
Test takes full responsibility for paper balls in the office and ruthless acts of paper ball terrorism will continue until our demands are met.
Betsy Aoki
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.
Brian W. Kernighan
They want everyone to learn and use CORBA! That should provide us all with many years of entertainment.
Philip Greenspun
Ironically, after a series of pay cuts, mandatory overtime, and benefits slashing, the email didn't help improve employee morale.
Alex Papadimoulis - The Daily WTF
Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
Barry LePatner
Identify a real need, figure out how to solve it with a minimum number of moving parts and without writing any unnecessary code, and execute it with talent and professionalism.
Mike Gunderloy on Mashups (via Search VB)
Our marketing professionals are constantly coming up with new ways to make you feel inferior and stupid. Because you are. And we're not.
HuhCorp.com
So, Microsoft has relaxed the NDA on Office 12 somewhat - enough that it's safe to say I've had a chance to play with the new user interface and I frankly detest it.
Mike Gunderloy (The Daily Grind)
"When people use the term Web 2.0, I always feel a little bit stupider for the rest of the day."
Joel Spolsky
"This is not to say that design is unnecessary. But after a certain point, design is just speculation."
Philip Chu
"No matter how slick the demo is in rehearsal, when you do it in front of a live audience the probability of a flawless presentation is inversely proportional to the number of people watching, raised to the power of the amount of money involved."
Mark Gibbs