You can learn more from failure than success. In failure you’re forced to find out what part did not work. But in success you can believe everything you did was great, when in fact some parts may not have worked at all. Failure forces you to face reality.
Nine people can’t make a baby in a month.
How does a project get to be a year behind schedule? One day at a time.
System debugging has always been a graveyard-shift occupation, like astronomy.
Present to inform, not to impress. If you inform, you will impress.
Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
To only a fraction of the human race does God give the privilege of earning one’s bread doing what one would have gladly pursued free, for passion.
Mediocre design provably wastes the world’s resources, corrupts the environment, affects international competitiveness. Design is important.
Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious.
A scientist builds in order to learn; an engineer learns in order to build.
The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.