Richard > Richard's Quotes

“I'll always remember a certain radio exchange that occurred one day as Walt and I were screaming across southern California 13 miles high. We were monitoring various radio transmissions from other aircraft as we entered Los Angeles Center's airspace. Though they didn't really control us, they did monitor our movement across their scope. I heard a Cessna ask for a readout of its groundspeed. "90 knots," Center replied. Moments later a Twin Beech required the same. "120 knots," Center answered. We weren't the only one proud of our speed that day as almost instantly an F-18 smugly transmitted, "Ah, Center, Dusty 52 requests groundspeed readout." There was a slight pause. "525 knots on the ground, Dusty." Another silent pause. As I was thinking to myself how ripe a situation this was, I heard the familiar click of a radio transmission coming from my back-seater. It was at that precise moment I realized Walt and I had become a real crew, for we were both thinking in unison. "Center, Aspen 20, you got a ground speed readout for us?" There was a longer than normal pause. "Aspen, I show one thousand seven hundred and forty-two knots." No further inquiries were heard on that frequency.”
― Brian Shul, Sled Driver: Flying the World's Fastest Jet

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
― haruki murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“I don't stop when I'm tired. I stop when I'm done”
― David Goggins, Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds

“The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“Your job as a developer is not just to create code that you can work with easily, but to create code that others can also work with easily.”
― John Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design

“Almost every software development organization has at least one developer who takes tactical programming to the extreme: a tactical tornado. The tactical tornado is a prolific programmer who pumps out code far faster than others but works in a totally tactical fashion. When it comes to implementing a quick feature, nobody gets it done faster than the tactical tornado. In some organizations, management treats tactical tornadoes as heroes. However, tactical tornadoes leave behind a wake of destruction. They are rarely considered heroes by the engineers who must work with their code in the future. Typically, other engineers must clean up the messes left behind by the tactical tornado, which makes it appear that those engineers (who are the real heroes) are making slower progress than the tactical tornado.”
― John Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design