Oct 03
“ And yet, in a typically optimistic programmer triumph of hope over experience, everyone believes that someone, somewhere, is building software the right way, and that we too could make software development predictable and well-behaved if only we possessed sufficient will and discipline.
Sep 27
“ Sometimes software delivery can appear to be about producing optimistic reports to keep senior management happy, or just creating “busy work” to keep people in paid employment, but that’s a topic for another day.
“ There was a time that I called myself a Java Programmer, just like Crazy Bob Lee. Then I grew up. I realized that the real joy of software is the creativity involved, the application itself, not the frameworks used to build it. From that day on I called myself an application developer.
Sep 26
“ It’s one of the advantages of free speech. It makes it easier to spot the idiots.
Sep 21
“ Frankly, none of the language enhancements proposed for Ruby 2.0 make my heart go pitter-patter. But give me a Ruby with performance as good as a really good Smalltalk VM, and the space of things for which you need statically-typed languages shrinks to a really uninteresting size.
“ Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.
Sep 20
“ Sure, they’re exposed to real application development, but they don’t do it themselves. As a result, none of their handiwork is extracted from actual working codebases. Which is a shame, because if it were extracted from actual working codebases then it might actually not suck.
Sep 15
“ Zero tolerance for “dangerous words” on the Internet? This is an idea so preposterous we’re surprised it isn’t the product of a committee made up of Red Chinese commissars and American public school administrators.
“ A sufficiently dumb engineer may hurt you more than most competitors will. When organized in loose formations, even in modest numbers, they can even kill an otherwise healthy business.
“ A good bug, I mean a really good, pound-your-head-on-the-desk-for-a-week bug, is exactly like a magic trick in that something impossible appears to be happening.
Sep 07
“ However I’ve become increasingly convinced that relational databases are some kind of sinister death cult who want to lure you in and get you to wear strange stripy clothes with shiny shoes and give all your money to your superiors in the cult. And if you don’t conform, or if you conform too well, you just know you’ll end up in a pit of dismembered bodies back in the woods somewhere.
Sep 04
“ We don’t believe that just because at one point back in the day we included an experiment, or chose to do an API, that it’s going to stay for ever. We don’t want to turn into Java, this pack rat that just keeps hold of any possession.
“ If you can just avoid dying, you get rich. That sounds like a joke, but it’s actually a pretty good description of what happens in a typical startup.
Sep 02
