Design profession applied to software development
by Marco Dorantes
(this site is on its beginnings)
The intent of this site is that it becomes a home for techniques and deep insights that professional software designers can use to improve their professional masterity in the trenches
"Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction."- Pierre Pachet
"Always tell the truth as you know it. If they don't like it, they can always find someone else who will lie"
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." -Popular Mechanics, 1949
"In real-life programming, nothing is as simple as it seems" -Benny K. Mathew
"There is no such thing as teaching, only learning" -Monty Roberts
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it" -Max Planck
"communities are built around trust" -posted in a wiki wiki web
"The perfection is reached not when there remain nothing to add, but when it does not remain nothing to remove" -Saint-Exupery
"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult" -Seneca
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it" -Donald Knuth
"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable" -D. D. Eisenhower
"Plans are unimportant; planning is essential" -D. D. Eisenhower
"One of the great commandments of science is:'Mistrust arguments from authority.'" -Carl Sagan
"wisdom begins when we discover the difference between 'That makes no sense' and 'I don't understand' -Mary Doria Russell
"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them" -Albert Einstein
"Example isn't another way to teach, it is the only way to teach" -Albert Einstein
"How do I sell my executive team on doing this stuff? Don't. Just do it. They don't know what you're doing anyway" -Jim Highsmith
"The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people" -Theodore Roosevelt
"If not now, when?" -The Talmud
"You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand" -Leonardo da Vinci
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" -Gandhi
"We think in generalities, but we live in detail" -Alfred North Whitehead, American philosopher
"If you call a tail a leg, how many legs has a dog? Five? No, calling a tail a leg don't make it a leg" -Abraham Lincoln
"If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor" -Albert Einstein
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" -Albert Einstein
"Each debugging run is an experiment that tests a hypothesis" -Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike
"When quality is pursued, productivity follows" -Carlo Ghezzi
"When I didn't think right about a program, the program bombed. The computer, I learned, was a _mirror_ of my intelligence, and I wasn't too impressed by my reflection" -Gerald M. Weinberg
"There are people who prefer to anchor themselves in the comfort of a limited level of knowledge. They consider themselves practical and 'real-world'-ish" -Andrei Alexandrescu
"There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about" -John von Neumann
"The in-the-large aspects of programming rely on the lower-level parts, and you can't get them right unless you get the small things right too" -Bertrand Meyer
"In any system, we tend to trade off complexity at one level so as to create the illusion of simplicity at another" -Grady Booch
"tools have the unfortunate tendency to backfire (Easing the correction of errors immediately leads to more errors being made)" -Edsger W. Dijkstra
"Many C++ design decisions have their roots in my dislike for forcing people to do things in some particular way" -Bjarne Stroustrup
"People are too different, projects are too different, and suggested features mutate during the effort to define, implement, and explain them. So I used the effort to define, implement, and explain features as a design aid" -Bjarne Stroustrup
"Escuchar, probar, codificar y diseñar. Eso es todo en software. Cualquiera que te diga algo diferente es por que te quiere vender algo" -Kent Beck
"Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost." -Bjarne Stroustrup
"The activities that people need do to build Web software do not differ from those we do with any software" -Martin Fowler
"If you don't think carefully, you might think that programming is just typing statements in a programming language" -Ward Cunningham
"It is a mistake to try to automate something when you don't know how to do it by hand" -Ralph Johnson
"Restrictive tools designed to prevent the worst programmers from failing often prevent the best programmers from succeeding" -Bjarne Stroustrup
"Blind enthusiasm, which doesn't acknowledge limitations, leads to expensive failures" -Bjarne Stroustrup
"I don't like hype" -Bjarne Stroustrup
"the act of constructing software is not engineering" -Alan Cooper
"The trouble with CASE tools, and with Visio's UML templates, is that they try to be intelligent. However their intelligence about UML is a lot less than the average developer, so instead the tools just get in the way" -Martin Fowler
"the most important product of any development organization is executable code. Everything else is secondary or tertiary. That's not to say they're not important, but that that they're important to the extent that I need those other things to help build that executable code" -Grady Booch
"Testing is about Specification, not Verification" -Robert C. Martin
"Processes don't solve problems, people do" -William Caputo
"Common sense isn't common" -Will Rogers
"Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is to not stop questioning" -Albert Einstein
"I'm giving the best advice I have. You get to decide whether it's true for you" -Ron Jeffries
"If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six sharpening my axe" -AbrahamLincoln
"Art: skill acquired by experience, study, or observation" -Merriam Webster Dictionary
"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible" -Lord Kelvin
"Speculation or experimentation - which is more likely to give the correct answer?" -Ron Jeffries
"It's easy to have a complicated idea. It's very very hard to have a simple idea" -Carver Mead
"If I had more time, I could have written you a shorter letter" -Blaise Pascal
"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great" -Mark Twain
"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future" -Niels Bohr
"Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding" -Proverbs 4:7
"An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest" -Benjamin Franklin
"There is no failure, only feedback" -NLP presupposition
"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult" -Seneca
"You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand" -Leonardo da Vinci
"You don't get harmony when everybody sings the same note" -Doug Floyd
"True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing"
"What I hear, I will forget; what I see, I may remember; what I do, I will understand" -Confucius
"The rules are ways of thinking, not ways to avoid thinking" -Ron Jeffries
"The quality of an idea isn't related to the stature of the person expressing it" -Ron Jeffries
"The perfection is reached not when there remain nothing has to add, but when it does not remain nothing has to remove" -Saint-Exupery
"Make something idiot proof and along comes a better idiot" -common saying
"Make something idiot proof and only an idiot will want to use it" -common saying
"With great power comes great responsibility" -Stan Lee
"Science progresses by replacing old theories with new" -Thomas S. Kuhn
"If we can discover the origins of some modern scientific concepts and the way in which they supplanted the concepts of an earlier age, we are more likely to evaluate intelligently their chances for survival" -Thomas S. Kuhn
"The limits of language are the limits of one's world" -Ludwig Wittgenstein
"Look to the master; Follow the master; Walk with the master; See through the master; Become the master" -Modern Zen Poem
"I know you think you know what I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard isn't what I meant" -Warren Keuffel
"Communication is hard. We may not pay the ultimate price the Columbia astronauts did for the Boeing/NASA miscommunication" -Warren Keuffel
"I work from the premise that software development has been, is, and will remain a fundamentally hard profession and no one thing will make a state change in how we develop software" -Grady Booch
"UML is fine as long as you erase the whiteboard when you are done" -Kent Beck, AppDev 2000 Conference, London
"A lot of preconceptions can be dismissed when you actually try something out" -Bruce Eckel
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct,not tried it." -Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)
"It looks obvious until you try it" -IEEE Software
"Good design is a discovery process, best accomplished with short, repeated exploratory cycles" -Mary Poppendieck
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes" -Edsger Dijkstra
"We hope to be 'progressively less wrong' over time" -Ken Auer, Roy Miller
"software is the fifth knowledge storage media since the beginning of the world (the first four were DNA, brains, devices, and books)" -Phil Armour
"Design is the collection of activities and tools that take one from the understanding of a problem to its solution" -James O. Coplien
"XP scales and sustains; its practices, in this iteration, prevent hidden burdens from accumulating and slowing down progress in future iterations. For example, sending kids to school, now, is simpler and cheaper than sending them to jail, later" -Phlip
"Some of us are skeptical of 100 person projects.Like I said before this week, population complexity is like code complexity. You don't know where the right size is unless you start small and simple. Big-staff-up-front is like big design up front" -Phlip
"I find that the single thing which inhibits young professionals, new students most severely, is their acceptance of standards that are too low" -Christopher Alexander, in the forward to Richard P. Gabriel's book "Patterns Of Software"
"When we are too tired to make good decisions, it can be a good decision to decide to stop making decisions for a while" -Ron Jeffries
"Some successful consultants, when taking over a troubled team, will send everyone home, and insist that they work rational hours (Steve McConnell, of Code Complete, does this). One reason is that whatever the team is doing now is not working, so doing it harder isn't going to solve the problem" -Tom Cabanski
"'Is Circle a subclass of Ellipse, or vice-versa, or neither?' This is one of those toy questions that have always bothered me. It's impossible to make a meaningful design because we aren't actually trying to accomplish anything. Designing inheritance hierarchies in the absence of goals and context is mental masturbation So: Code Circle,Code Ellipse,Refactor" -Jim Shore
"Programming is like surgery -- every day, and you really don't see doctors doing it alone" -Michael Feathers
"Discover the great literature in your profession or area of interest -- the finest books, articles, and speeches ever written -- and then begin an earnest study of these works" -Joshua Kerievsky
"If you read even one good programming book every two months, roughly 35 pages a week, you'll soon have a firm grasp on the industry and distinguish yourself from nearly everyone around you" -Steve McConnell
"The correctness of software can only be improved by constructive methods" -Edsger W. Dijkstra
"Excessive or irrational schedules are probably the single most destructive influence in all of software" -Caspers Jones
"We can write good or bad programs with any tool. Unless we teach people how to design, the languages matter very little" -David Parnas
"The structure of a system tends to mirror the structure of the group producing it" -Mel Conway
"For every complex problem, there is a simple answer, and it's wrong" -H.L. Mencken
"Steering is more important than speed, in driving and in software development" -Ron Jeffries
"We can't go any faster than we can go. All we can do is tell the truth. I think that's a better deal than 'We have the analysis 90 percent done' " -Ron Jeffries
"I've been thinking about value objects for 15 years or so and am still trying to figure them out. Eric's explanation is the best I've seen so far, but it is still incomplete. Lots of people have tried to explain value objects and none have completely succeeded. So, don't expect to figure them out quickly" -Ralph Johnson
"La construcción de un programa de computadora, a partir de un conjunto de instrucciones básicas, es bastante similar a la construcción de una demostración matemática a partir de un conjunto de axiomas" -Donald E. Knuth
"Trying to force the person to behave in a manner more suitable for the machine is often (rightly) considered offensive" -Bjarne Stroustrup
"Constructing programs so that improvements can be implemented through local modifications only is an important design aim" -Bjarne Stroustrup
"'Religious OO' is dangerous as is 'Religious X' for most values of X" -Bjarne Stroustrup
"Rules of Optimization: Rule 1: Don't do it Rule 2 (for experts only): Don't do it yet"-M.A. Jackson
"una plataforma es tan grande como el programador que la utiliza, nada más" -Ernesto Quiñones
"Architecture is the decisions that you wish you could get right early in a project" -Ralph Johnson
"Software is not limited by physics, like buildings are. It is limited by imagination, by design, by organization. In short, it is limited by properties of people, not by properties of the world. 'We have met the enemy, and he is us' " -Ralph Johnson
"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." -C.A.R. Hoare
"No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thought" -Voltaire
"The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error" -Bertolt Brecht,Life of Galileo
"He who will not apply new remedies must expect old evils" -Francis Bacon
"A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest" -Paul Simon
"There is nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things we don't know" -Ambrose Bierce
check:"In the history of mankind, evolution in thought and behavior always it seem first as heresy and misconduct" -Bertrand Russell
"Genius is the ability to recognize something of significance when you stumble across it"
"Will Turner: This is either madness or brilliance.Captain Jack Sparrow: It's remarkable how often those two traits coincide" -Ron Jeffries?
"Never be afraid to do something yourself. Remember - amateur built the Ark, professionals built the Titanic" -Gov Maharaj
"I prostrate myself in honor of one capable of selling Slack to the Suits" -Phlip
"If all you want is the answer, I'll give it to you. If you want to learn a known formula, I can give that to you too. But if you want to learn how to truly understand something, I can't give you that understanding. I can only help guide you as you discover it for yourself" -Ken Boucher
"Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing... layout, processes, and procedures" -Tom Peters
"Look to the master; Follow the master; Walk with the master; See through the master; Become the master" -Modern Zen Poem
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" -Albert Einstein
"Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn't" -A. A. Milne
"Never be afraid to do something yourself. Remember - amateur built the Ark, professionals built the Titanic" -Unknown
"Never be afraid to try something new. Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark. A large group of professionals built the Titanic" -Unknown
"Economists talk about measuring the level of trust in a society. It's been proven that societies where there is greater trust experience faster economic growth" -David Anderson
"Better to define our task as a process of discovery and dialogue more than as an act of diagnosis and prescription" -Peter Block on Flawless consulting,a guide to getting your expertise used
"Be the change you wish to see" -Gandhi
"A falling leaf affects the farthest star" -Albert Einstein
"I Keep six faithful serving-men Who serve me well and true: Their names are What and Where and When And How and Why and Who" -Rudyard Kipling
"Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience and psychology, he shows how the difference between good decision-making and bad has nothing to do with how much information we can process quickly, but on the few particular details on which we focus" -Malcolm Gladwell
"Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never--in nothing, great or small, large or petty--never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense" -Winston Churchill
"There is no greater danger than a mediocre idea in the hands of a gifted communicator" -Tom DeMarco
"All generalizations are false, including this one" -Mark Twain
"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new" -Niccolo Machiavelli
"Seek forgiveness, not permission" -I.M. Wright
"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking" -Albert Einstein
"Don't let the sense of moral, prevent you from doing what is right" -Issac Asimov
"knowledge will not come from teaching but from questioning" -Plato
"El ser humano quiere las cosas. No sus consecuencias" -Balzac
"No hay inmoralidad mayor que desempeñar un oficio que no se conoce" -Napoleón
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" -Walt Whitman
"Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work a company work, a society work, a civilization work" -Vince Lombardi
"Pride so easily tips into arrogance and prosperity into greed" -Leonard Sayles, Cynthia Smith
"History is philosophy teaching by example" -Dionysius
"La gente soportará una buena dosis de sufrimiento mientras esta sea nueva y excitante y se le imponga de manera autoritaria. Un don nadie experimenta una peculiar suerte de servil satisfacción en dejarse engullir en el poder..." -Elias Canetti
"The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another" -Richard P. Feynman
"In theory there is little difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is" -Yogi Berra
"So there is already reason to believe that some knowledge is inaccessible to us" -Joe Marasco
"We should run test cases not to look for bugs, but to increase our confidence in a program we are quite sure us correct" -David Gries
"I have learned more from my failures than can ever be revealed in the cold print of a scientific article" -C.A.R. Hoare
"If only we could learn the right lessons from the successes of the past, we would not need to learn from our failures" -C.A.R. Hoare
"I have regarded it as the highest goal of programming language design to enable good ideas to be elegantly expressed" -C.A.R. Hoare
"As an engineer you have a responsibility to quantitatively understand the costs and benefits of your proposed solution. Using our design guidelines to focus and limit your choices to patterns which have historically proven to be good choices is a great way to focus your work and be more effective but it does not discharge your responsibility" -Rico Mariani
"When it comes to the rich and convenient .NET Framework, it's like we're kids in the candy store. It's all so easy. So easy, indeed. So easy to burn megabytes of RAM parsing XML infosets just to pull a few elements out of them. In C or C++ it was so painful you'd think twice.... With the .NET Framework, you just load the whole infoset in one gulp. Maybe you even do it over and over. Then maybe your application doesn't seem so fast anymore. Maybe it has a working set of many megabytes. Maybe you should have thought twice about what those easy methods cost..." -Jan Gray, CLR Performance Team
"The Principle of Addition: The best way to reduce ineffective behavior is by adding more effective behavior" -Gerald M. Weinberg, "Quality Software Management, Volume 1: Systems Thinking"
"Beyond 'good enough', quality is economically bad. He who perfects, dies" -Bertrand Meyer
"In component development, perfectionism is good" -Bertrand Meyer
"'But how can you do anything without designing it first?!' The answer is we are designing it - the code is the design" -Steven Gordon
"it is not only the programmer's task to produce a correct program but also to demonstrate its correctness in a convincing maner" -Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
"Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence" -Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
"It's not about what we think they want; it's about what we learn they need" -Brad Appleton
"There's no language that is so simple that an ignorant person can't write poor code, or so simple that even an experienced person can't learn from a master" -Ron Jeffries
"Keep the simple things simple. Don't make everyone pay for complexity only a few people need" -Raymond Chen
"Q:What are the most exciting, promising software engineering ideas or techniques on the horizon? A:I don't think that the most promising ideas are on the horizon. They are already here and have been for years, but are not being used properly" -David Lorge Parnas
"The way to win is not to play" -Raymond Chen
"Talent determines how fast you get good, not how good you get" -Richard Gabriel
"In those situations I have always found there to be hidden costs and the time is never short enough.
"Where I live I can grow a garden, gather eggs, and hunt for meat. There are also physical jobs available here which require sweat, but don't suck my soul. I'd rather program, but living well at the subsistance level is more attractive to me than being in work situations that compromise my values.Money is nice, but when I have put it first I have always regretted what came after" -Kent Beck
"I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated" -Poul Anderson
"In XP, we don't divide and conquer. We conquer and divide. First we make something that works, then bust it up and solve the little parts" -Kent Beck
"The practices are not "best" practices, they are just practices" -Kent Beck
"That beauty and power [of software patterns ] come from everyday programming at the hands of everyday programmers more often than they come at the hands of exalted architects" -Jim Coplien
"When I create a domain model I want to make sure that I can execute and test it" -Ralph Johnson
"There will also be a Fascicle 1 for Volume 4. But I've written Fascicle 2 first. Experienced programmers will understand that the initialization of a program usually can't be written properly until after the main body has been fleshed out" -Donald E. Knuth
"The first thing to build is TRUST!" -Brad Appleton
"If software development were just coding and debugging, we might get away with some kind of groupware, but the bread-and-butter activity of a software engineer is talking to another person" -Tom DeMarco
"Time, cost and quality matters. Truth and beauty are means, not ends" -John Guttag
"The next important moment in my life was in 1955 when I decided to become a programmer; I took that decision because I had concluded that of theoretic physics and programming, programming embodied the greatest intellectual challenge" -Edsger W. Dijkstra
"An optimist who's falling from the top of a 100-story building, as he passes the 50th floor, he exclaims 'So far, so good!' "- anomymous
"If you trust and empower your software and other high-technology professionals to manage themselves, they will do extraordinary work" -Watts S. Humphrey
"People often need to be reminded that not only does everyone make mistakes, everyone gains much of their most valuable experience when given an oportunity to learn from their mistakes" -Tom Gilb
"If you cannot manage yourself, you have no business managing others" -Gerald Weinberg
"I am here to discuss the pros and cons of our ideas in the complex world of people and projects" -Ron Jeffries
"Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice" -Christopher Alexander
"No plan survives first contact with the enemy" -Helmuth von Moltke
"If you can't think of three things that might go wrong with your plans, then there's something wrong with your thinking" -Gerald Weinberg
"Nothing succeeds like success" -Corey Ladas as a collorary to Jim Highsmith ~just do it
"OO (or SO) only delivers on its promise if executed correctly" -Joe Sharp
"Accountability is the silicone ceramic non-stick coating which protects you and your self image from blame" -Cynthia Andres
"There can only be so many cooks in the kitchen. what taste would the meal has?"
"Computer science hasn't achieved the grand narrative that explains it all, the big picture, we haven't found the fundamental laws of software that would play the role that the fundamental laws of physics play for other engineering disciplines" -Philippe Kruchten
"There is no way to do what you want while following our design guidelines and best practices.You should not swallow exceptions that you were not expecting.Only an unhandled exception filter should do this and then, the app should terminate" -Jeffrey Richter
"If UML is the answer, not many people are asking the question" -Jim Fawcette
"a complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked" -John Gall
"The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull;therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague" -Edsger Dijkstra
"design adds value faster than it adds cost" -Joel Spolsky
"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 Kernighan
"In the next decade there'll be a shortage of great software engineers. We'll be scouring the schools for them" -Bill Gates http://news.yahoo.com/s/cpress/20051014/ca_pr_on_tc/bill_gates_cda_2
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled" -Richard P. Feynman
"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong" -Richard P. Feynman
"Process should be like the engine under the hood of a car, ever present, but invisible" -Ivar Jacobson
"User stories start the process by writing down just two pieces of information: each goal to be satisfied by the system and the rough cost of satisfying that goal. Putting a price on features early encourages prioritizing from the beginning instead of a panicked abortion of scope at the end to meet a delivery date" -Kent Beck
"We can only show that a program has bugs. We can never show that it has no remaining bugs. The most valuable test is the one that fails" -Joe Marasco
"He who has imagination without education has wings, but no feet" -Dare Obasanjo
"All generalizations are dangerous, including this one" -Alexandre Dumas
"some authoritarian evidence and knowledge should be validated by empirical evidence, logical reasoning, and critical thinking before you should consider it reliable, and, in most cases, only you can do this for yourself" -Steven D. Schafersman
"A new scientific truth does not establish itself by its enemies being convinced and expressing their change of opinion, but rather by its enemies gradually dying out and the younger generation being taught the truth from the beginning" -Max Planck
"Fail early and often. Examine your mistakes and try again. And when you fail again, retrospect, and try again. Through repeated failure we rise to a higher level of performance. This is the Toyota way"
"Scientists are in the business of generating knowledge, whereas engineers are in the business of generating technology" -http://www.gly.uga.edu/railsback/1122science3.html
"At Microsoft, what you contribute is more important than who you know" -MS Poll
"In my work group, we eliminate practices that stand in the way of achieving results" -MS Poll
"We are a products and services company. We hire the most brilliant and passionate technical people, and give them the tools and environment where they can do their best work" -Steve Ballmer
"It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives" -Francis Bacon
"Those who are enamored of practice without theory are like a pilot who goes into a ship without rudder or compass and never has any certainty where he is going. Practice should always be based upon a sound knowledge of theory" -Leonardo da Vinci
"Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt the people doing it" -Chinese proverb
"If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something" -Zen Master
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny..'" -Isaac Asimov
"In God we trust, all others bring data" -W. Edwards Deming
"Western theology (Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition) portrays God as too small, a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy, much less of a universe" -Carl Sagan
"I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research" -Albert Einstein
"The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it" -Chinese Proverb
"Enlightenment is man's emergence from self imposed immaturity ("Unmündigkeit", translated here as the phrase "immaturity and dependence") for which he himself was responsible. Immaturity and dependence are the inability to use one's own intellect[1] without the direction of another. One is responsible for this immaturity and dependence, if its cause is not a lack of intelligence, but a lack of determination and courage to think without the direction of another. Sapere aude! Dare to know! is therefore the slogan of the Enlightenment" -Immanuel Kant
"Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is the incapacity to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. Such tutelage is self-imposed if its cause is not lack of intelligence, but rather a lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another" -Immanuel Kant
"It is curious how what is Kansas for somebody, could be Oz for somebody else, and vice versa" -Marco Dorantes
"Aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life" -Dr. David M. Burns
"Somos esclavos de nuestras palabras y dueños de nuestro silencio" -Yet unknown
"Philosophy, in any case, is not about believing what is fashionable, but about discovering is true" -Edward Feser
"Filosofía, en todo caso, no se trata de creer en lo de moda sino del descubrimiento de lo cierto" -Edward Feser
"One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike -- and yet it is the most precious thing we have" -Albert Einstein
"What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism" -Albert Einstein
"I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details" -Albert Einstein
"Quiero saber cómo Dios creó este mundo. No estoy interesado en este o aquel fenómeno, en el espectro de este o aquel elemento. Quiero saber Sus pensamientos; el resto son detalles" -Albert Einstein
"Leadership exists when people are no longer victims of circumstances but participate in creating new circumstances" -Peter Senge
"There is nothing more practical than a good theory" -Kant
"Science is the art of interrogating nature" -AAAS 1990:17
"Scientific knowledge is not absolute; rather, it is tentative, approximate, and subject to revision" -AAAS 1990:20
"Scientists reject the notion of attaining absolute truth and accept some uncertainty as part of nature" -AAAS 1989:26
"To be useful, a hypothesis should suggest what evidence would support it and what evidence would refute it" -AAAS 1989:27
"An idea's merit depends on its content, not its sponsor (and indeed the reverse sentiment is a logical fallacy, namely, the genetic fallacy)" -Hugh G. Gauch, Jr.
"I think part of the problems with the educations is that the layground is not being built as it must be whether this is called Math, Developing, Logic, Philosophy, etc." -Francisco Javier Baños
"The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive because it not only can be economically and scientifically rewarding, it can also be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music" -Donald Knuth
"Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the 'things' that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name" -Bill Buxton
"Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer" -Edsger W. Dijkstra
"Never again will we let ourselves be brainwashed into forgetting that programs are the stuff of our trade and that everything else is scaffolding" -Bertrand Meyer
"I'm not terribly experienced with Agile, but I would hope that it would avoid the planning for all the infrastructure and features that didn't get built..." -Eric Gunnerson
"Simplicity is key for speed and eficiency" -Jim Gray
"people,projects,papers,programs" -Jim Gray
"I don't think you want to ship machine generated code" -Ovidiu Platon
"The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don't understand" -Joel Spolsky
"Success is a lousy teacher" -Bill Gates
"The key is to write finalizers that don't make assumptions about the state of the object" -Justin Brown
"Big handwavy generalizations made from a position of deep ignorance is one of the biggest wastes of time on the net today" -Joel Spolsky
"It's not enough to read the tutorials. You have to sweat and bleed with the thing for a year or two before you really know it's good enough or realize that no matter how hard you try you can't make your UI taste like real food" -Joel Spolsky
"A gelled software team is the most powerful software development force there is" -Robert C. Martin
"It has often been said that a person does not really understand something until he teaches it to someone else. Actually a person does not really understand something until he can teach it to a computer, i.e., express it as an algorithm" -Donald Knuth
"It is unfortunate that many people don't seem to appreciate that often code can provide the best expression of a model" -Dave Thomas
"Process improvement should be done to help the business-not for its own sake" -CMMI
"Object-Oriented Programming is like teenage sex: everyone thinks they discovered it, and that they do it well, but the reality is otherwise" -90's saying
"Q:What will replace OO? A:What replaced addition? It wasn't replaced by multiplication, it just found a proper place in the more advanced scheme of things; so will OO" -Kristen Nygaard
"Agile development means using feedback to prevent waste and optimize development" -Brad Appleton
"The only way to go fast, is to go well" -Robert C. Martin
"...there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult" -Tony Hoare, 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture
"Software cost overruns, schedule delays, and poor quality have been endemic in the software industry for more than 50 years" -Capers Jones
"The system is stable; let's just document the known problems" -Quality control manager of a tier-one application vendor
"Effective software development requires creative contextual human thought, not blindly following some rules" -Steven Gordon
"The principle of minimizing costs is fine as far as it goes, but in the face of uncertainty, up-front decisions don't minimize cost. Creating and exploiting a feedback loop results in lower overall costs" -Kent Beck
"Design is the thinking one does before, during, and after implementation. It works best for me with a little up front, most of it during implementation, and very little after it's too late" -Ron Jeffries
"Like full-time pairing and full-time TDD, people generally can't see across their pre-conceived notions about effectiveness until they actually do it" -Brad Wilson
"software design and programming are pure cheer joy! (and synonymous)" -Marco Dorantes
"The problem is that so many organizations and professionals think of education as something that happens once, when we are young, and of training as a form of sporadic punctuation afterwards" -Larry L. Constantine
"The really valuable things to learn are the most basic" -Larry L. Constantine
"It's a little odd for programmers to speak of formal methods as if they were something special -as if formality were an option. If you want to program a computer, you really don't have any choice. Computation is formula evaluation" -Jonathan Jacky
"My experience is that the organization adopts Scrum, whereas the developers adopt XP. Effectively, Scrum is the interface to the organization and XP implements that interface. There are good reasons that we usually define/negotiate interfaces before we implement those interfaces" -Steven Gordon
"The solution is to stop estimating in the traditional way, and start doing something that works" -Robert C. Martin
"Everyone may be trying to help, but good intentions are no substitute for competence" -Dan Starr
"Señores Imperialistas ¡No les tenemos absolutamente ningun miedo!" -algún cubano
"The perspectivity and variability even of mathematical scientific methods in particular require us to be constantly aware of their limits in respect of reality as a whole, which is always greater" -Hans Küng
"Their failure over science and new developments in philosophy, society, and politics, theology and the church essentially contributed to the establishment of scientific and political atheism" -Hans Küng
"If day after day goes by with nobody discussing uncomfortable questions like these, won't the good people of my country be guilty of making things worse?" -Donald E. Knuth
"Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig" -Robert A Heinlein
"Why waste time learning when ignorance is instantaneous?" -Hobbes
"La ignorancia es una desgracia voluntaria" -Nicolas Ling
"The principal goal of education is to help individuals become capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; individuals who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered" -Jean Piaget
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind" -Albert Einstein
"I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil. My God created laws that take care of that. His universe is not ruled by wishful thinking, but by immutable laws" -Albert Einstein
"Machines should work. People should think" -Richard Hamming
"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed" -Sir Francis Bacon
"El camino a la certeza está; plagado de dudas" -?
"Gran parte de las dificultades por las que atraviesa el mundo se debe a que los ignorantes están completamente seguros, y los inteligentes, llenos de dudas" -Bertrand Russell
"He sido una persona afortunada; nada en la vida me ha sido fácil" -Sigmund Freud
"Superstition is foolish, childish, primitive and irrational -- but how much does it cost you to knock on wood?" -Judith Viorst
"It's pretty much impossible to make suggestions about possible designs without knowing the problem that the design is intended to solve" -Eric Lippert
"'Best' is always situational" -Darren Anderson
"Singularity we often found in the trenches while regularity is what most non-practitioners sent us to look for" -Marco Dorantes
"My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket" -Donald E. Knuth
"It looks obvious until you try it" -IEEE Software
"It is very difficult to make a vigorous, plausible, and job-risking defense of an estimate that is derived by no quantitative method, supported by little data, and certified chiefly by the hunches of the managers" -Fred Brooks
"Read, listen, think, ask questions, write, practice" -a problem-solving course intro
"Don't wait until the last minute to get help." -a problem-solving course's tip #1
"Bad things happen while learning a new skill. You will probably crash and burn on some programs. Start early; give yourself time for mistakes" -a problem-solving course's tip #2
"Why the mainframe manufactures could not see the advantage of many-computers owners? Because they were successful (became fat)" -Fred Brooks
"Tell me how you will measure me and I will tell you how I will behave" -Eli Goldratt