Last month I visited Silicon Valley again. Always nice to be there. Not only for the weather and the surroundings, but also always really good to catch up and work together with my overseas colleagues face to face again. Only the flight from Amsterdam to San Francisco is not a short one, though that leaves you a lot of time for reading. So I took my chance and took with me some various writings, most notably Coders at Work, which I can definitely recommend.

Anyways, all that reading got me to pen down some random but interesting quotes I encountered:

There are two ways to design a system: “One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other ways is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies” —- C.A.R. Hoare.

“When documents are mostly to enable handoffs, they are evil. When they capture a record that is best not forgotten, they are valuable” —- Tom Poppendieck.

“Its easier to optimize correct code than to correct optimized code”—- Joshua Bloch.

“There’s a grand myth about requirements: If you write them down, users will get exactly what they want. That’s not true. At best, users will get exactly what was written down, which may or may not be anything like what they really want.” —- Mike Cohn

It’s interesting that only such a small number of words can express such a great deal of experience.