Chad Myers also has a great post explaining his development methodology, called I don't trust me.
I've been reading C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man, and have found a good version of it online thanks to Columbia University.
Finally, DevTopics has 101 great computer programming quotes (via Chad Myers, via DotNetKicks). Here are some of my favourites:
“The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.”
(Henry Petroski)
“Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.”
(Ray Ozzie)
“There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users'.”
(Edward Tufte)
“The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late.”
(Seymour Cray)
“That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.”
(Larry Niven)
“A hacker on a roll may be able to produce–in a period of a few months–something that a small development group (say, 7-8 people) would have a hard time getting together over a year. IBM used to report that certain programmers might be as much as 100 times as productive as other workers, or more.”
(Peter Seebach)
“The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability.”
(Randall E. Stross)
“Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming; feedback is the treatment.”
(Kent Beck)
“In software, we rarely have meaningful requirements. Even if we do, the only measure of success that matters is whether our solution solves the customer's shifting idea of what their problem is.”
(Jeff Atwood)
“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are–by definition–not smart enough to debug it.”
(Brian Kernighan)
“As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.”
(Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949)
“I don't care if it works on your machine! We are not shipping your machine!”
(Vidiu Platon)
“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.”
(Martin Golding)
