Quotes¶

Tags: personal, python

If I see a nice quote, I store it in a textfile somewhere. There’ve been a few good ones lately, so here are some. From websites, blogs and mailinglist messages. No guarantees about correct attribution, though I’ve tried to write down where I found it.

Culinary mayhem from my brother Maurits:

When dinner is calling, you need a rifle.

Talking about dinner:

It will be like loosing a dragon in the chicken coop.

Project management by Robert Bloch:

The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone to blame it on.

kcunning has a dire warning:

She will come out like a cat you’ve dunked in cold bathwater. It will only be amusing for the person watching it on YouTube later.

Sane programming advice by Brian W. Kernighan:

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

Elizabeth Warren about the financial bump in the road:

The reason banks lost confidence in each other is because they looked at their own books.

Keep at it, keep at it. Paul Graham:

I’ve been surprised again and again by just how much more important persistence is than raw intelligence.

Make noise, embarrass yourself, get famous, be happy. Martijn Faassen:

I’m a natural noise-maker, and I discovered that while as a result of this I embarrass myself in public on a regular basis, it also means a lot of people know who I am. That’s a good thing.

In Dutch you have a saying “killing a mosquito with a canon”. This is a nice alternative:

It really feels like killing an ant with a sledgehammer.

ESR about the faking of climate data, specifically some of the comments in the also-released source code:

This isn’t just a smoking gun, it’s a siege cannon with the barrel still hot.

Chris McDonough about the need for documenting your software:

Document the shit out of it, like it was for your grandma.