Writing programs in terms of the problem domain rather than in terms of lowlevel implementation details reduces your mental workload.
- Steve McConnell
I wonder how many great novelists have never read someone else’s work, how many great painters have never studied another’s brush strokes, how many skilled surgeons never learned by looking over a colleague’s shoulder…. And yet that’s what we expect programmers to do.
—Dave Thomas
Code as if whoever maintains your program is a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
—Anonymous
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
-Martin Fowler
In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
—The Peter Principle
The important question is, do you want prediction, or do you want control?
-Tom Gilb
Building a skyscraper requires a different approach than building a doghouse. Different sizes of software projects work the same way.
- Steve McConnell
No programmer has ever been able to predict or analyze where performance bottlenecks are without data. No matter where you think it’s going, you will be surprised to discover that it is going somewhere else.
- Joseph M. Newcomer
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
- Peter Drucker
Any organization that designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.
- Melvin E. Conway