QOTD

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Old QOTD's

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冰冻三尺,非一日之寒
Three feet of ice does not result from one day of freezing weather

Exery six months, Anne-Marie, who is my dental hygenist, gives me the same lecture on the importance of flossing. Adn each time, I half-heartedly promise that I will make more of an effort--but I never keep that promise. Some developers treat testing in the same way I treat flossing: It's a good idea but they either do it with great reluctance or not at all

— Chris Richardson, Pojo's In Action ISBN 1932394583

Going back into the realm of buildings for a minute, a classic case in point is the new library building for the City of Seattle, opened up in Spring 2005. On paper, it looked impressive - a large angled window facade, sections designed to be organic and flowing and non-linear, an aspiring vision for the future. However, somewhere along the line the architect forgot about the two fundamental facets of libraries - it houses books and provides a space for readers to read them

Whatever the structure of your work, the real value in sofware development is added when skilled developers write high-quality, appropriate code, delivering what the customer needs.

— David Thomas, from the Foreward to
Software Craftmanship ISBN 0-201-73386-2

The current stampede toward outsourcing will ultimately level off as companies get a better handle on the aforementioned overhead issues and recognize that some outsourcing makes sense, but they also need to keep some of the best and brightest software developers in-house. I just hope the current outsourcing frenzy doesn't drive away so many talented people and future engineers that our country can't compete in this field over the long haul.
From: Software Career Paradox

— Tom Smith

This is the only industry left where we can ship products with known defects and not get sued. How long do you think that will last? [1]

— Jack Ganssle

Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration. [2]

Why is scalability so hard? Because scalability cannot be an after-thought. It requires applications and platforms to be designed with scaling in mind, such that adding resources actually results in improving the performance or that if redundancy is introduced the system performance is not adversely affected [3]

[The common definition of estimate is] An estimate is the most optimistic prediction that has a non-zero probability of coming true. Accepting this definition leads irrevocably toward a method called what's-the-earliest-date-by-which-you-can't-prove-you-won't-be-finished estimating.

I think of software being a work — very much like a wiki being a work — where people see an area that's weak and they make it stronger

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