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Which quotes apply best to software development?

Ben Halpern on December 31, 2019

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

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Ben Halpern

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

  • Paul Gauguin
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SamuelRafini

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

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Matt Ellen-Tsivintzeli

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

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Dana Ottaviani

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

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Ben Halpern

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

I love that.

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Stephen Belovarich • Edited

Do or do not, there is no try.

  • Yoda

Yoda

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Ben Lovy

Four! I mean five! I mean fire!

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

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

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Alex Patterson

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

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Greg Edelston

...And those who know ternary.

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Ankit Beniwal

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

Bruce Lee

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Michael Caveney

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

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Casey Brooks

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.

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MurrayVarey

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

  • Raymond Chandler
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Corey McCarty

This is how I blog. Writing several in parallel.

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MurrayVarey

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.

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Corey McCarty

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.

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Chris Naismith

"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.

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Tanmay Naik

Perseverance wins where talent gives up.

  • Me
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Michael Lee 🍕

Weniger, aber besser.
Less, but better.

  • Dieter Rams
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Kevin

You can have it fast, working, or cheap. Pick two.

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John Munro

pick one is what I say.

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Aleksandr Hovhannisyan

I get it. I don't get it. - JonTron

Really hits home.

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Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard

What comes to my mind is a very french quote that neatly encapsulate our Hype Driven Delopment Culture

"Pourquoi faire simple quand on peut faire compliqué?"
Why use a simple solution when a complex one will do?

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Maximilian Berkmann

I can relate to this too damn hard it hurts.

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manish srivastava • Edited

I would like to share two thoughts:

  1. "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people -Eleanor Roosevelt

when I was 16 Years Old my Late Father told me this thought but he added one more thing to it- Intelligent Mind act in Silence. Today, I know what it really means.

Whenever I meet young developers, I share this thought telling them Your Silence learning will make you a wonderful developer as well as wonderful person to contribute to your field.

  1. When I was 6 years old. I see a thoughts board on the school students gathering Hall. It says: The Day will happen, the weather will not get up. I don't know who's thought it was and was to date unable to find the person.

Every developer should Know, There is a time limit to deliver the project. That Day will happen and the customer wants the project as he desired.

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Aubrey Fletcher

What the heck is that?!

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Chad Kunde • Edited

Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.
tr: I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.

  • Blaise Pascal
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Maximilian Berkmann • Edited

The translation is slightly wrong IMO but relatable.
It should be "I have made this longer just because I don't have the leisure to make it shorter" (you could also use "do" depending on the context).

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Prince-Alarming

"Do a job you love and you won't work a day in your life" - Steve Jobs

My motto

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G.L Solaria

Electronics engineer to me: If it's not smoking, it's a software problem.

A quote from a friend: Real women don't point and click, they give commands.

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Monika Jandrevska

"Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand." - Martin Fowler

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John Munro

slow is smooth, smooth is fast

slower development time and correct planning makes changes and fixes much quicker later on be multiples.

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M.T

“The only constant in life is change” - Heraclitus

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Mohamed ELIDRISSI

Great quote from a blog post I read just a few days ago.

Remember: the purpose of the software is not to show off how intelligent you are. 

Max Kanat-Alexander, Code Simplicity

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John McLem Adan • Edited

"In programming the hard part isn’t solving problems, but deciding what problems to solve."

  • Paul Graham
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Swarup Kumar Mahapatra

"I live, I die, I live again" - Mad Max Fury Road.

To all fellow devs , who fix bugs just to find new bugs in production

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capjackarrow

"The art of giving the same name to different things"

  • Henri Poincare, originally to describe Mathematics
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Fulton Browne • Edited

Moooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooove - nick burns - SNL

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Oliver

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction."
E.F. Schumacher

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Max Ong Zong Bao

"When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it." by Henry Ford

"No man is an island" by John Donne

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Matheus Gomes 👨‍💻

A good dev is the one that copy code and know what is copying.

-anonymous

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Sean (Diddy)

A bit late to the party, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

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Mohit Raj • Edited

Its works only in my system #code

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Jariullah Safi

"All code is garbage and every programmer needs the courage to regularly take out the trash." ~ Me but someone else originally (probably).

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I'm Luis! \^-^/

"It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."

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Jason V. Castellano • Edited

Well, one of my favorite quotes: "The easiest thing to do in life is to do things that told, the hardest thing to do, is to do things when nobody is watching."

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Alex Kondov

“Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.”

― Kevin Durant

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AndreKelvin

Write code like a blind man is going to read it

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Dávid Zoltán

It is not broken. It's for something else.

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Michael Caveney

"Nobody knows anything"

-William Goldman

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Wahid Ibrahimy

Endless learning!

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Tristan Gibbs

“It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment”

-Carl Friedrich Gauss