It is impossible not to notice Ruby on Rails. It has had a huge effect both in and outside the Ruby community... Rails has become a standard to whic….

Why is composing symphonies tough? I don't know. It's just very few people in the world can do it well. And I think that's the case with upfront desi….

Comprehensiveness is the enemy of comprehensibility..

I can only think of so many good ideas in a week. Having other people contribute makes my life easier..

So I hope I’ve made clear that imposing agile methods is a very red flag..

One of the things I've been trying to do is look for simpler or rules underpinning good or bad design. I think one of the most valuable rules is avoi….

Comparing to another activity is useful if it helps you formulate questions, it's dangerous when you use it to justify answers..

Continuous Integration is a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently, usually each person integrates at ….

If you're afraid to change something it is clearly poorly designed..

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand..

I find that writing unit tests actually increases my programming speed.

When to use iterative development? You should use iterative development only on projects that you want to succeed..

The biggest issue on software teams is making sure everyone understands what everyone else is doing..

One of the big dangers is to pretend that you can follow a predictable process when you can't..

In almost all cases, I’m opposed to setting aside time for refactoring. In my view refactoring is not an activity you set aside time to do. Refactori….

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

Never in the annals of software engineering was so much owed by so many to so few lines of code.

When you actually sit down to write some code, you learn things that you didn't get from thinking about them in modeling terms...there is a feedback ….

A pattern is an idea that has been useful in one practical context and will probably be useful in others..

If you're a technical lead, you need to be coding..

I can't choose whether someone is offended by my actions. I can choose whether I care..