Excerpts from books

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum

• “The most expensive program is one that runs once.”
• “To deliver both power and pleasure to users, interaction designers think first conceptually, then in terms of behavior, and last in terms of interface.”
• “Homo sapiens live in a world of probabilities … and programmers live in the world of possibilities.”

The mythical man month

• “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
• “The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.”
• “Build one to throw away; you will, anyhow.”
• “Good cooking takes time. If you are made to wait, it is to serve you better, and to please you.”

Object Design: Roles, Responsibilities, and Collaborations

• “We have a license to reinvent the world, because modelling the real world in our machinery (i.e., domain model) is not our goal.”
• “Our measure of success lies in how cleverly we invent a software reality that satisfies our application’s requirements— and not in how closely it resembles the real world.”
• “If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
• “Errors in product specification are the most costly because they ripple through all of the downstream activities.”
• “No object is ever designed in isolation.”
• “The sum of systems intelligence is what it knows, the actions it can perform, and the impact it has on other systems and its users.”

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

• “Until code is in production, no value is actually being generated, because it’s merely WIP (Work In Progress).”
• “Improvements of daily work are more important than doing daily work.”
• “A system always has an inherent amount of disorder, and this increases over time unless work is done to maintain or reduce it.”
• “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”