86 Quotes About Software

Reusability is key in reducing bugs and coding quickly. The more I use a piece of code, the more confident and familiar I become with it, which in turn significantly speeds up my development time.

In my experience, requirements change quite often, or new situations will arise that weren’t anticipated at the start of the project. If the situation can be addressed with a plugin, I just whip open the standalone plugin page, make the updates and pop the new plugin back in. Because the plugin is self-contained, it’s easy to recreate the problem, fix it, and get it back into the codebase.

Ultimately, I try to think of my application’s main codebase as just stringing together various components and code from many sources. It just controls logic and flow. The real nitty-gritty is handled behind the scenes. This is why frameworks like Backbone are so important — they hide a lot of the details in the background and allow you to just focus on the flow and control of your application.

A good standalone plugin can also make you a fair amount of money. Many developers make a decent living by simply maintaining and updating one or two crucial plugins that are far better than anything available for free.

Software is eating the world, so we need software developers. But it is less clear what we will need when software finishes its meal and settles down to digest. What happens when robots learn to program themselves?

El desarrollo de software comparte con el deporte profesional la característica de lograr que los treintañeros se sientan decrépitos

With software there are only two possibilites: either the users control the programme or the programme controls the users. If the programme controls the users, and the developer controls the programme, then the programme is an instrument of unjust power.

One of my favorite books, and one that changed how I think about software and the evolution of ideas, was A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander (Oxford University Press).

In the era of surveillance of the masses, I like to use phrases like terrorists, assassinate, bomb, explosions, attack, weapons of mass destruction, and so on in my on-line activities to screw up the automated government surveillance software.