Sasha S. > Sasha's Quotes

“According to my three-time ex-drummer Brooks Headley, "The D-beat is so stupid that it's easy to fuck up. And when you fuck it up, it goes from brutal military pictures of dead bodies straight to Benny Hill theme song.”
― Sam McPheeters, Mutations: The Many Strange Faces of Hardcore Punk

“Над світом нависли три хвороби, три пошесті.
Перша — хвороба націоналізму.
Друга — хвороба расизму.
Третя — хвороба релігійного фундаменталізму.
У цих трьох хвороб є одна спільна риса, спільний знаменник — агресивна, всевладна, тотальна ірраціональність.”
― Ryszard Kapuściński, Imperium

“There is even in the most selfish passion a large element of self-abnegation. It is startling to realize that we call extreme self-seeking is actually self-renunciation. The miser, health addict, glory chaser and their like are not far behind in the exercise of self-sacrifice. Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self.”
― Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind: And Other Aphorisms

“Клептократ і мудрий державний діяч, барон-грабіжник і громадський доброчинець відрізняються лише мірою: тобто тим, яку частку стягненої із виробників данини утримує еліта і наскільки простолюду подобається громадське використання, на яке спрямовується стягнена данина.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“The patriotic fervor of a population is not always in direct proportion to its well-being and the fair dealing of its government. Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect. Hence the paradox that when government policies or historical accidents make the attainment and maintenance of individual self-respect difficult, the nationalist spirit of the people becomes more ardent and extreme. The unattainability of individual self-respect is not the least factor behind the chauvinism of the populace in Fascist and Communist regimes.”
― Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind: And Other Aphorisms

“Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at.”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

“Вбивцями із психологією вбивць є міліціонер, прокурор, суддя. Вони не ризикують. Вони убивають заносячи свої вбивства до протоколу. Немає нічого більш мерзотного ніж державне насильство. Коли говорять про бюрократичну диктатуру, уявляють залізні колони, диктатора перед мільйонними масами, Гітлера, Сталіна. Про таке можна лише мріяти, адже в дійсності це обтяжена побутом сорокарічна дамочка - суддя у районному суді, що присуджує років до 12-ти по справах, які вона в принципі навіть фізіологічно не здатна зрозуміти.”
― Дмитро Корчинський, Війна у натовпі

“I have two complaints about the above tests. The first is that executing them manually is about as exciting as watching a banana rot, and the second is that (as I predicted), they’re not very good automated tests either.”
― Alan Page, The "A" Word. Under the Covers of Test Automation

“If you have bad tests, automation can help you do bad testing faster.”
― James Marcus Bach, Lessons Learned in Software Testing: A Context-Driven Approach

“Making use of AJAX in your application design removes this potential logjam and can lead to a great end-user experience.
The crux of the problem is that automated test tools are by default designed to work in
synchronous fashion.”
― Ian Molyneaux, The Art of Application Performance Testing: Help for Programmers and Quality Assurance

“Of course, the web servers are not always the cause of the problem. I have seen many
cases where virtual users timed out waiting for a web server response, only to fnd that
the actual problem was a long-running database query that had not yet returned a
result to the application or web server tier. This demonstrates the importance of setting
up KPI monitoring for all server tiers in the system under test (SUT).”
― Ian Molyneaux, The Art of Application Performance Testing: Help for Programmers and Quality Assurance

“In the AJAX world, a client can make a request, the server responds that it has received the request (so the client can get on with something else), and then at some random time later the actual response to the original request is returned. You see the problem? It becomes a challenge to match requests with the correct responses. From a programming standpoint, the performance tool must spawn a thread that waits for thecorrect response while the rest of the script continues to execute. A deft scripter may
be able to code around this, but it may require signifcant changes to a script with the
accompanying headache of ongoing maintenance. The reality is that not all testers are bored developers, so it’s better for the performance tool to handle this automatically.”
― Ian Molyneaux, The Art of Application Performance Testing: Help for Programmers and Quality Assurance

“RCS was the first version control tool I used. When I was at Spyglass, we had a team of 50 or so developers across three platforms using RCS on a shared code base. Since RCS never had support for networking, people on Windows and Mac had to log in to the Sun workstation that hosted RCS, FTP their code changes up there, and then check them in from the Unix shell. It was an interesting experience just trying to get all that to work.”
― Eric Sink, Version Control By Example

“Your chances of winning the Powerball lottery are far better than finding a hash collision. After all, lotteries often have actual winners. The probability of a hash collision is more like a lottery that has been running since prehistoric times and has never had a winner and will probably not have a winner for billions of years.”
― Eric Sink, Version Control By Example

“The majority of the cost of software is incurred after the software has been first deployed. Thinking about my experience of modifying
code, I see that I spend much more time reading the existing code than I do writing new code. If I want to make my code cheap, therefore, I should make it easy to read.”
― Kent Beck, Implementation Patterns

“Exceptions occur at different levels of abstraction. Catching and reporting a low-level exception can be confusing to someone who is not expecting it. When a web server shows me an error page with stack trace headed by a NullPointerException, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with the information. I’d rather see a message that said, “The programmer did not consider the scenario you have just presented.” I wouldn’t mind if the page also provided a pointer to further information that I could send to a programmer so he could diagnose the problem, but presenting me with untranslated details isn’t helpful.”
― Kent Beck, Implementation Patterns

“So if you want to go fast, if you want to get done quickly, if you want your code to be easy to write, make it easy to read.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“A long descriptive name is better than a short enigmatic name. A long descriptive name is better than a long descriptive comment.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“When you see commented-out code, delete it!”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“The first rule of functions is that they should be small. The second rule of functions is that they should be smaller than that.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“Whatever else a TODO might be, it is not an excuse to leave bad code in the system.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“For example, class names including weasel words like Processor or Manager or Super often hint at unfortunate aggregation of responsibilities.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“In fact, wrapping third-party APIs is a best practice. When you wrap a third-party API, you minimize your dependencies upon it:”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“Flag arguments are ugly. Passing a boolean into a function is a truly terrible practice.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“The folks who think that code will one day disappear are like mathematicians who hope one day to discover a mathematics that does not have to be formal. They are hoping that one day we will discover a way to create machines that can do what we want rather than what we say. These machines will have to be able to understand us so well that they can translate vaguely specified needs into perfectly executing programs that precisely meet those needs. This will never happen.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“Consider, for example, the truly hideous practice of creating a variable named klass just because the name class was used for something else.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“When people look under the hood, we want them to be impressed with the neatness, consistency, and attention to detail that they perceive. We want them to be struck by the orderliness. We want their eyebrows to rise as they scroll through the modules. We want them to perceive that professionals have been at work. If instead they see a scrambled mass of code that looks like it was written by a bevy of drunken sailors, then they are likely to conclude that the same inattention to detail pervades every other aspect of the project.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“A common pattern for teams that start with test automation, or development groups that start breaking down silos between testers and developers, is to take existing manual tests and automate them. Unless it’s a training exercise for an automation tool, this is almost always a bad idea.”
― Gojko Adzic, Fifty Quick Ideas To Improve Your Tests

“When teams decide to automate a set of existing tests that were previously designed as manual tests, the best way forward is to rewrite and redesign the tests from scratch. Keep the purpose, but throw away pretty much everything else.”
― Gojko Adzic, Fifty Quick Ideas To Improve Your Tests

“If you have to spend effort looking at a fragment of code and figuring out what it's doing, then you should extract it into a function and name the function after the "what".”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code