45 Quotes by Martin Fowler

Comparing to another activity is useful if it helps you formulate questions, it’s dangerous when you use it to justify answers.

Now I’m a pretty lazy person and am prepared to work quite hard in order to avoid work.

So I hope I’ve made clear that imposing agile methods is a very red flag.

One of the big dangers is to pretend that you can follow a predictable process when you can’t.

Why is composing symphonies tough? I don’t know. It’s just very few people in the world can do it well. And I think that’s the case with upfront design. It is very hard to do well.

I can’t choose whether someone is offended by my actions. I can choose whether I care.

If you can get today’s work done today, but you do it in such a way that you can’t possibly get tomorrow’s work done tomorrow, then you lose.

It’s more than a little ironic that many of us preach safety first to our children, nieces, and nephews but in our roles as programmers scream for freedom, a hybrid of the Wild West gunslinger and teenage driver. Give us freedom, give us the resources, and watch us fly.

If you have to spend effort looking at a fragment of code and figuring out what it’s doing, then you should extract it into a function and name the function after the “what”.