Note to self: review these quotes when you finally decide to get back to developing
UberDeployer* and write something about it on the blog.
* UberDeployer is a little proof-of-concept tool I’ve coded at my current workplace
that aims to provide an automated deployment (or maybe even continuous delivery) solution
for more complex, enterprisey settings, where you have dozens of applications and services going through multiple
staging environments and bureaucracy standing in your way.
All of the quotes below come from Eric Raymond’s essay titled
“The Cathedral and the Bazaar”. Don’t be put off by the fact that this article dates as far
as 1997 — this one is a timeless gem and I don’t know why I hadn’t stumbled upon it before.
I’ve emphasized three quotes that resonate with me the most at the moment when I think about starting an
open-source endeavour. What are yours?
1. “Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.”
2. “Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).”
3. “Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.” (Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, Chapter 11)
4. “If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.”
5. “When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.”
6. “Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective
debugging.”
7. “Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.”
8. “Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly
and the fix obvious to someone.” or “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” (Linus’s Law)
9. “Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.”
10. “If you treat your beta-testers as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your
most valuable resource.”
11. “The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is
better.”
12. “Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was
wrong.”
13. “Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing
more to take away.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
14. “Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never
expected.”
15. “When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible
and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!”
16. “When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.”
17. “A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.”
18. “To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.”
19. “Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet,
and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.”
