Year in Quotes

Here at iMarc, we have a Wiki to keep track of our plans, process, and documentation.

The Wiki's home page starts with a quotation. Any employee can change the quote. When a new quote is posted, the old one gets archived.

Here are some of the quotations we've seen over the last year:

Premature optimization is the root of all evil

— Donald Knuth, computer science professor

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked…A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

— John Gall, author

I'm a pretty lazy person, and am prepared to work quite hard in order to avoid work.

— Martin Fowler, author, software architect

In a perfect world, the client would’ve had the business rules worked out prior to starting a project, leaving the designer to wallow in artistic brilliance while a co-ed rolls by on a Segway drinking a soy protein shake, but as you all know, utopia doesn’t exist and it’s almost impossible to drive a Segway with one hand.

— Greg Storey, business owner

I like when good things happen to me, but I wait two weeks to tell anyone because I like to use the word fort-night.

— Demetri Martin, comedian

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

— Antoine de St. Exupery, writer, aviator

Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.

— Steve Wozniak, woz

Q: What makes you believe Linux will continue to gain momentum?

A: I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things. I compare it to science vs. witchcraft. In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it -- but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it. Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in knowledge.

— Linus Torvalds, software engineer

If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.

— Albert Einstein

Even if a man's whole day [is] spent as a servant to an industrial concern, in his spare time he will make something, if only a window box flower garden.

— Eric Gill, typographer, printer, author

Design is what you do when you don't yet know what you are doing. Real design is done during the unstructured, informal, noodling around that occurs before the structured and formal 'design' methods are employed.

— George Stiny, professor

It is crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination.

— The 9/11 Commission Report

Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three.

— Old fisherman's saying

There is no spec; to me, the spec is the interface screens... [T]here is nothing functional about functional specs. The only functional part is a real running application; so we try to get to real running applications as soon as humanly possible, and then that’s the spec. So, whatever the way the application works right now, is supposed to be the way the application works right now - and if we disagree, we change the real application. We don’t go back and try to find some spec and rewrite some of that.

— David Heinemeier Hansson, programmer