Can you share your favorite quote or rule related to IT?

I like quotes and funny rules. A good quote makes our presentation more interesting, draws attention to the presenter and makes the presentation unforgettable. Ridiculous or easy-to-remember rules help us keep in mind essential things.

Below one of my favorites:

• Quote

  "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing."
  Alan Perlis

• Rule

  "A team shouldn't be larger than what two pizzas can feed."
  Jeff Bezos

Now it's your turn to share your quotes and rules related to IT ;)

Comments

[Evan Oman]

Not restricted to IT, but anyone who has tried estimating work can relate to this:

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

Hofstadter's Law

[Ben Halpern]

Ha! That's great.

[Christopher Toman]

Sadly true, I always multiply by 4, but I think I got to do power of 4

[Julian]

Coders are special. "We are expected to know how to do things we've never done before and estimate how long they will take."

[R3i]

love this!

[Promise Ogbonna]

❤

[Devin Handspiker-Wade]

Users lie. They may not be lying about an issue, how they ran into the issue, or how the bug is affecting them but assume there's at least one lie in every bug report. It may be something completely unimportant. They have no reason to lie, but they will.

• A past manager of mine.

[Rafal Pienkowski]

This sentence reminds me Dr House's favorite saying:

[Quentin Sonrel]

The first thing that came to my mind !

[Evaldas Buinauskas]

Status: critical.

[Devin Handspiker-Wade]

"Top Priority" and hasn't responded to the ticket in a year and a half.

[Cadell]

"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, be definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian Kernighan

[Rafal Pienkowski]

It's so real.

[Leah Einhorn]

Just read a similar one!

Debugging code is twice as hard as writing it, so always write code as if you're a halfwit.

[Chris James]

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

The first line of the Agile Manifesto is the one that gets ignored the most.

[Ben Halpern]

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.

-Tom Cargill

There’s even a Wikipedia page about the 90-90 rule.

[TMcSquared]

I heard somewhere that multiplying a developers time estimate by PI is very accurate most of the time.

[Chris Bertrand]

What's PI?

[TMcSquared]

3.141519265358979323.....

[Nano.]

"Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning." - Unknown

[Rafal Pienkowski]

This is very similar to

Think twice, code once.

which I've heard some time ago.

[Dustin King]

There's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.

-- Howard Cauvel

[Ryan Palo]

Make it work, make it right, make it fast.
-- Kent Beck

My other favorite is this:

if you ever code something that "feels like a hack but it works," just remember that a CPU is literally a rock that we tricked into thinking
[...]
not to oversimplify: first you have to flatten the rock and put lightning inside it
-- @daisyowl

[Filippo]

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a
violent psychopath who knows where you live.

John F. Woods

[Sethu Senthil]

If you don't succeed in your first attempt, call it version 1.0

[Casey Brooks]

Similar to a line I've found myself saying a lot lately:

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

[Moner]

I like this one!

[Alessandro Ronchi]

I love this quote from Mark Twain:

"continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection"

[Ted Hagos]

And here I thought Robert McCall said it first "progress not perfection" :)

[Brian Emilius]

"Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

[AndreKelvin]

First rule of IT 😂

[Ted Hagos]

Now I want to watch Roy and Moss again

[Rafal Pienkowski]

I've heard this many times from my sys admins.

[Adnan Rahić]

Confusion is your friend. If you feel confused, remember that's when you're learning.

• Mattias P. Johansson, Funfunfunction

[Jakob Christensen]

A bug is like an iceberg - it always goes ten times deeper than you can see.

Me :-)

[Rafal Pienkowski]

Nice :)