Quotes
“My goal is to get to green as quickly as possible. Red is not when you ponder the abstraction.” “Duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction.”
– Sandi Metz presenting “All The Little Things” at RailsConf 2014.
“I prefer to make the structure of my programs self-illuminating, eliminating the need for comments. I am not always successful, so while my programs are awaiting perfection, I am writing comments.”
– Douglas Crockford, in JavaScript: The Good Parts, 1st Edition
“You know the real problem with frameworks? They demo too well. Someone shows you their favourite framework and demonstrates how you can build 50% of your application in half an hour! Great! That other 50% can’t be hard, can it? But it turns out that what looked like 50% is actually 5%, and filling in the other 95% gets exponentially more difficult as you approach the 100% mark. Frameworks are great for building toys, and that fools us – again and again – into assuming they’re good for building products.”
– Mike Taylor @ The Reinvigorated Programmer
Rule 13 in Strunk and White is “Omit needless words” — advice as good now as it was when originally published in 1918. I leave you with S&W’s characteristically terse exposition of this rule:
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
“The problem is that big companies are run by business people, not designers or engineers. Too often they deal in numbers rather than good ideas. And this attitude stifles inventiveness and competitive spirit.”
– James Dyson, from a piece in the Times Online
“Search is a way to HARVEST demand, not to CREATE it”
– Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox, on trying to grow a product through AdWords (which didn’t work out well for them)
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
– Steve Jobs
It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.
– Teddy Roosevelt
“The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
– Carl Sagan.
Other
“The institutional structure of the United States is under stress. We might be in dangerous economic straits if the dollar were not the principal international reserve currency and the eurozone in deep fiscal trouble. We have a huge public debt, dangerously neglected infrastructure, a greatly overextended system of criminal punishment, a seeming inability to come to grips with grave environmental problems such as global warming, a very costly but inadequate educational system, unsound immigration policies, an embarrassing obesity epidemic, an excessively costly health care system, a possible rise in structural unemployment, fiscal crises in state and local governments, a screwed-up tax system, a dysfunctional patent system, and growing economic inequality that may soon create serious social tensions. Our capitalist system needs a lot of work to achieve proper capitalist goals.”
– U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Posner
mlc
mlc classic:
ruby
unless /viagra/i.match(@email.subject)
Emailer.deliver_email(@email)
end
From a chat with mlc:
1:55:26 foz: how about Eliza?
1:55:45 foz: isn't there some way to integrate that as a captcha?
1:55:46 mlc@jabber.org: earlier you asked how about Eliza?
1:55:54 foz: I see.
1:56:01 mlc@jabber.org: it seems you are interested in vision
1:56:08 foz: lol