A Quote A Day for Software Engineers by A. Bartlett Thistlethwaite
There is not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought.
Pierre Bayle
In general, an implementation must be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior.
Jon Postel
Computer programs are the most complex things that humans make.
Douglas Crockford
The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple.
Grady Booch
Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost.
Bjarne Stroustrup
Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.
Rene Descartes
People forget how fast you did a job – but they remember how well you did it.
Howard Newton
Code should run as fast as necessary, but no faster; something important is always traded away to increase speed.
Richard E. Pattis
When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove
defective code.
Richard E. Pattis
Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.
Eric S. Raymond
Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.
Henry Ford
A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
A problem is a chance for you to do your best.
Duke Ellington
To be a programmer is to develop a carefully managed relationship with error. There’s no getting around it. You either make your accommodations with failure, or the work will become intolerable.
Ellen Ullman
To solve any problem, here are three questions to ask yourself:
First, what could I do?
Second, what could I read?
And third, who could I ask?
Jim Rohn
Nothing works better than just improving your product.
Joel Spolsky
The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.
Edsger Dijkstra
Those that can, do. Those that can’t, complain.
Linus Torvalds
Better train people and risk they leave than do nothing and risk they stay.
Anonymous
Learning is weightless, a treasure you can always carry easily.
Chinese Proverb
Geeks are people who love something so much that all the details matter.
Marissa Mayer
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
Martin Fowler
You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself.
Ken Thompson
The best way out of a problem is through it.
Anonymous
A couple of months in the laboratory can save a couple of hours in the library.
Frank H. Westheimer
A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.
Victor Hugo
Listening, Testing, Coding, Designing. That’s all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.
Kent Beck
Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines.
Robert Schuller
Believe the terrain, not the map.
Brian Kernighan
Software work is the most complex that humanity has ever undertaken.
Fred Brooks
You need the willingness to fail all the time.
John Backus
Just because people tell you it can’t be done, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it can’t be done. It just means that they can’t do it.
Anders Hejlsberg
I love software, because if you can imagine something, you can build it.
Ray Ozzie
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
Edsger Dijkstra
Design principle: Take things away until the design breaks, then put that last thing back in.
Alan Cooper
Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.
Bill Gates
You can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company.
Jamie Zawinski