Brad Parker > Brad's Quotes

“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”
― Linus Torvalds

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live”
― John Woods

“How you look at it is pretty much how you'll see it”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

“You've baked a really lovely cake, but then you've used dog shit for frosting.”
― Steve Jobs

“Big Brother fills us all with the same crap. My guess is he was clever the same way everybody thinks they're clever. I tell her to type in 'password”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

“What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?”
― James Alan Gardner, Ascending

“Any organisation that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organisation's communication structure”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Architecture

“Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I'll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.”
― Jamie Zawinski

“If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.”
― Donald Knuth

“You can Change Your Organization or Change Your Organization”
― Martin Fowler

“Our consciousness is programmed. We see things a certain way from a young age - we're programmed to keep doing them that way. Then you have to spend adulthood learning how to overcome it, to read out the programs. Try to create. I want to tell people to create. Just start by creating your day. Then create your life.”
― Prince, The Beautiful Ones Sheet Music

“Schools are in many ways perhaps the first step in getting us to understand that institutions control our lives and that we should accept unquestionably that there can be no objection to this.”
― Mango Wodzak, Discovering Eden Fruitarianism - An Autobiography - Volume One

“If it's not written, it never happened. If it is written, it doesn't matter what happened.”
― Sercan Leylek

“Tom Demarco, a principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild team of consultants ... and his colleague Timothy Lister devised a study called the Coding War Games. The purpose of the games was to identify the characteristics of the best and worst computer programmers; more than six hundred developers from ninety-two different companies participated. Each designed, coded, and tested a program, working in his normal office space during business hours. Each participant was also assigned a partner from the same company. The partners worked separately, however, without any communication, a feature of the games that turned out to be critical.

When the results came in, they revealed an enormous performance gap. The best outperformed the worst by a 10:1 ratio. The top programmers were also about 2.5 times better than the median. When DeMarco and Lister tried to figure out what accounted for this astonishing range, the factors that you'd think would matter — such as years of experience, salary, even the time spent completing the work — had little correlation to outcome. Programmers with 10 years' experience did no better than those with two years. The half who performed above the median earned less than 10 percent more than the half below — even though they were almost twice as good. The programmers who turned in "zero-defect" work took slightly less, not more, time to complete the exercise than those who made mistakes.

It was a mystery with one intriguing clue: programmers from the same companies performed at more or less the same level, even though they hadn't worked together. That's because top performers overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption. Sixty-two percent of the best performers said that their workspace was acceptably private, compared to only 19 percent of the worst performers; 76 percent of the worst performers but only 38 percent of the top performers said that people often interrupted them needlessly.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“The real nightmare, worse than the one in which the Big Machine wants to kill you, is the one in which it sees you as irrelevant, or not even as a discrete thing to know.”
― Benjamin H Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

“No one with feeds things about it," she said. "When you have the feed all your life, you're brought up to not think about things. Like them never telling you that it's a republic and not a democracy. It's something that makes me angry, what people don't know about these days. Because of the feed, we're raising a nation of idiots. Ignorant, self-centered idiots.”
― M. T. Anderson

“Any woman who is sure of her own wits, is a match, at any time, for a man who is not sure of his own temper.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“Whoever controls the media, controls the mind”
― Jim Morrison

“My life didn't please me, so I created my life.”
― Coco Chanel

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”
― Noam Chomsky, The Common Good

“Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.”
― Terence McKenna

“Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.”
― Sigmund Freud , Moses and Monotheism

“A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“Freedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.”
― Epictetus

“Because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.”
― Madeline L'Engle

“No matter how much you love someone, you still want to have you own way.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

“I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Do you know we are being led to
Slaughters by placid admirals

& that fat slow generals are getting
Obscene on young blood

Do you know we are ruled by t.v.
”
― Jim Morrison, An American Prayer

“In racing, they say that your car goes where your eyes go. The driver who cannot tear his eyes away from the wall as he spins out of control will meet that wall; the driver who looks down the track as he feels his tires break free will regain control of his vehicle.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain