oandre.gal

Category: Fortunes

  • Why we rock

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    1 minute

    While money can help produce good software, clear communication channels between developers and users and a unified team can easily outperform more rigid development environments. – I feel sorry for closed-source developers, Bruce Momjian.

  • Valve: on failure

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    Screwing up is a great way to find out that your assumptions were wrong or that your model of the world was a little bit off. As long as you update your model and move forward with a better picture, you’re doing it right. […] There are still some bad ways to fail. Repeating the same mistake over…

  • On meritocracy and self-promotion

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    Just as demagogues may subvert democracy, so self-promotion may subvert meritocracy. – Open Source Projects and the meritocracy myth.

  • Institucional memory

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    Institutional memory comes in two forms: people and documentation. People remember how things work and why. Sometimes they write it down and store that information somewhere. Institutional amnesia works similarly. The people leave and the documents disappear, rot, or just become forgotten (as it were). – On institucional memory and reverse smuggling.

  • It has to work

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    If you’re try­ing to make a suc­cess­ful tech prod­uct, 90% of the bat­tle is that it works at all. – It has to work, Havoc Pennington.

  • Google Wave

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    And this is the essential broader point — as a programmer, you must have a series of wins, every single day. It is the Deus Ex Machina of hacker success. It is what makes you eager for the next feature, and the next after that. And a large team is poison to small wins. The…

  • Automattic creed

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    I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before…

  • Apple’s release early, release often

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    Real artists ship. – Steve Jobs, 1983. Related: how Apple releases its products and why it’s one of its strengths.

  • On the closure of code

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    Code should grow by addition rather than mutation. – Measuring the closure of code, Michael Feathers. Via: Software volatility.

  • On lines of code

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    If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as “lines produced” but as “lines spent”. – Edsger Dijkstra. Quoted on Are all patches create equal? by Jonathan Corbet.

  • RMS on leadership

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    Free software communities have a system much better than elections: you can choose which leader you wish to follow and how much. If you want to be a leader, start leading, and see who wants to help. – Richard Stallman.

  • The hardest thing

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    The hardest thing [for a programmer] is to go to sleep at night when there are so many urgent things needing to be done. – Donald Knuth.