The Rise of ``Worse is Better''

The Rise of ``Worse is Better'': "The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing."

I know I've read this article before, and when I stumbled across a reference to it I was surprised I hadn't blogged it before.

Pipes and Filters for the Internet

In this article Tim O'Reilly borders on a little too much visionary hubris for my taste, but it is nonetheless a good read about a Yahoo tool that is aiming to be the Unix shell of web services.

My favorite quote:

In The UNIX Programming Environment, Kernighan and Pike write that at the heart of the Unix philosophy "is the idea that the power of a system comes more from the relationships among programs than from the programs themselves."

O'Reilly Radar > Pipes and Filters for the Internet

Amatuers talk tactics; professionals talk logistics.

While cleaning out my car I saw a random receipt with this unattributed quote, unsafely scrawled down while driving, which I heard from some military officer talking on NPR.

It instantly rang true to me with respect to writing software; it rang so true that I risked life and car to transcribe it rather than lose it along with all the other jokes and truisms I hear and promptly forget.

The quote gets at why I'm studying Software Engineering:
Logistics in the world of software is Software Engineering .

Any clever person with a reasonable grasp of boolean logic can code; that is tactics. To build a software system that does what users really need, that will last for years, and works for more than 100 users, then do it again on the next project, and again- this takes logistics.

busyness vs accomplishment

Ketzel Levine inteviewed Tom Dascle in her series on career changes

I like his quote (paraphrased):

In work it's important to recognize the difference between busyness and accomplishment.

...that the dog sings at all

“It’s not how well the dog sings but that the dog sings at
all.”

Author unknown to me, I just thought it was hilarious!

usually it's your own stupid fault

"The difficult thing with programming isn't usually the syntax but the fact that most people can't cope with the computer doing exactly what they tell it to do."

This gets right at the heart of why programming can be so frustrating, it's usually your own stupid fault.

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=129894&cid=10833686