Ben Halpern

Posted on Dec 31, 2019

Which quotes apply best to software development?

#discuss

What quotes about life, wisdom, and the world in general apply very well to software development?

Top comments (53)

Ben Halpern • Dec 31 '19

A painting is never finished - it simply stops in interesting places.

Paul Gauguin

SamuelRafini • Dec 31 '19

Code is like a joke. When you have to explain it, it’s bad.

Matt Ellen • Jan 6 '20

If you have to explain a joke that means it's very clever 😋

Dana Ottaviani • Dec 31 '19

Mine are probably more towards respecting each other in the software industry than development itself, but I hope it's acceptable.

Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, "In this world, Elwood, you must be," - she always called me Elwood - "In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.

-Elwood P. Dowd, "Harvey"

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

-Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

The single biggest problem with communications is the illusion that it has taken place.

-George Bernard Shaw

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

-Samuel Beckett

Ben Halpern • Dec 31 '19

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

I love that.

Stephen Belovarich • Dec 31 '19 • Edited

Do or do not, there is no try.

Yoda

Ben Lovy • Dec 31 '19

Four! I mean five! I mean fire!

Maurice Moss, The IT Crowd, Season 1 episode 2, 2006

sdorbala • Dec 31 '19

That is a funny line from Maurice. Love the series.

Alex Patterson • Dec 31 '19

There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who know binary and those who don't.

Greg Edelston • Jan 7 '20

...And those who know ternary.

Ankit Beniwal • Dec 31 '19

Practice makes perfect. After a long time of practicing, our work will become natural, skillfull, swift, and steady.

Bruce Lee

Michael Caveney • Dec 31 '19

I legit think about Bruce Lee and programming all the time, especially that thing he said about it not being about daily increase but daily decrease

Casey Brooks • Dec 31 '19

What's the best way to get something production-ready? Use it in production.
~ Me

This is my tagline here on DEV. It's a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it also has a lot of truth in it. Your code will never be 100% production-ready; at some point, you have to just bite the bullet and ship. And that's good, because the only way to really find the edge case bugs, the issues with scale, and the strange ways people are using your code is to actually let them use it, even if it's not perfect yet.

MurrayVarey • Dec 31 '19

Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.

Raymond Chandler

Corey McCarty • Jan 3 '20

This is how I blog. Writing several in parallel.

MurrayVarey • Jan 3 '20

Same -- it's the easiest way to get words out onto a page. I've heard people call it The Vomit Draft. I find it also applies to coding.

Corey McCarty • Jan 3 '20

Coding with a vomit draft is important to comment previous iterations (possibly previous vomit) so that when you go to clean up that you might find something important in one of those comments. But, please do not leave commented code for long term.

Chris Naismith • Jan 1 '20

"The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing." -Walt Disney

One thing I've learned over the last couple years, is meetings about work is no substitute for work. The amount of progress that can be made from 'heads down' programming can be remarkable. Meetings certainly have their place at making sure everyone is on the same page but too much talking gets in the way of doing.