Revised
Guiding principles
Some of my guiding principles in (working) life.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Leonardo da Vinci
Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
Hal Abelson and Jerry Sussman
Testing can show the presence of errors, but not their absence.
Edsger Dijkstra
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
Martin Fowler
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.
Albert Einstein
There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.
Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
Martin Golding
We know it's morally wrong to copy and paste code once more, but no one's looking. /.../ If our geeky friends discover the duplicates, they'll no longer hang out with us. We need a better design: one that's DRY, one that'll make mothers proud.
Venkat Subramaniam
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
Edsger Dijkstra
Suppressing exceptions with empty catch blocks or printing them in arbitrary places is pure evil.
Venkat Subramaniam
The best code you can write is code that accomplishes something complex, but is inherently understood by those who examine your codebase.
Laurie Barth
Don't make me think.
Steve Krug
No matter what happens to us this day, I will stand behind every decision that you make. However it goes, when we walk out of this room, we walk out of this room as a team.
Gene Kranz
We are all on this one spaceship together. We better start taking care of it.
Frances Northcutt
Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value.
Albert Einstein
There's a responsibility in being a person. It's more than just taking up space where air would be.
John Steinbeck
This is your world, these are your people. You can live for yourself today, or help build tomorrow for everyone.
VNV Nation (Foreword)
E pur si muove.
Galileo Galilei
Possunt nec posse videntur.
Motto for Svea Life Guards
Wisdom from experience:
- Keep it simple.
- Management by ear is always better than management by fear.
- If you always follow someone else's footsteps, you will never be first.
- The sky is no limit.
- "We have always done it like this" and "The majority think this is correct", are not really arguments.
- Some things that the history of science has taught me; most coins have two sides, an M may be a W from opposite side, and an N may be a Z when viewed from another angle.
- Don't care about the box at all when thinking.
- If you don't care about the details, you don't care at all.
- First focus on the functionality, then the look-and-feel.
- You can't teach height.
May you walk in beauty
