Not in code

I chanced upon this thought provoking quote by John Holt on Josh Kaufman’s blog.

Since we can’t know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned.

Josh has also put together something he calls The Personal MBA, which is at its essence, a reading list of 40 books. Of course there’s more to it than this but you’ll have you read its manifesto to find out the rest.

I came across this little gem while reading the Unix philosophy page on Wikipedia (Mike Gancarz’s 9 paramount precepts are worth a read).

“UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things.” � Doug Gwyn

I think you could say the same about Ruby.

�There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.�

- Freya Stark

[Via the Chief Happiness Officer]

“I was born for passion, passion in my work and the people relating to it.”

Thanks to James Pott for showing me this wonderful piece on passion by Ron Jeffries.

Much of the agile software movement is about loosening controls, shifting more to asking forgiveness rather than permission. Yet loosening controls isn’t the same as anarchy and no control - a misrepresentation that’s commonly thrown at agilists too. It’s about asking how we can use a minimum of controls, so that that we don’t suffocate the good in our desire to protect ourselves from the bad.

From Martin Fowler’s Bliki: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/WikipediaDeath.html

In the Elements of Style, William Strunk describes one of his pricinples of composition Omit needless words by saying

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.

These words resonate with me; I hold a similar view about how software should be written and as I read this book a number of its rules & principles seem to apply equally to writing good software. This makes sense since the majority^ of code we write is in English. It seems to me that every developer who aspires to be their best would do well to aquire this guide; so, I’ve added this book to my list of books every software developer should own.

^I recently discovered that most of SAP’s code is written in German.

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?”

Mahatma Gandhi, “Non-Violence in Peace and War”

– His words seem as apt as ever today.

Listen to those who speak
Speak to those who listen

I found this classic whilst reading the XP Evaluation Framework page at C2.com. Enjoy.

I’ve always wanted to maintain a list of quotes that appeal to me. Now that I have this blog I’ve decided that I’m going to post these quotes here in their own category – Quotes(yawn). Here’s my first entry…

“Quality is not done by accident; it is done only by skilled & motivated people” – Watts Humphery

Source: CMMI® Distilled: A Practical Introduction to Integrated Process Improvement, 2nd Edition By Dennis M. Ahern, Aaron Clouse, Richard Turner.