Jeff Atwood Quotes

But everyone should try writing a little code, because it somehow sharpens the mind, right?

6. Think about what you're not thinking about

Obviously we want to succeed. But on some level, success is irrelevant, because the process is inherently satisfying. Waking

The proper monitoring attitude is not to be distrustful, but instead, to show interest in their work.

Good thing you’re tagging all those Low Priority tasks. God forbid you’d ever lose track of shit that’s not worth doing.

If you do not trust your people, you will not get their whole-hearted effort and you will not capitalize on the enormous creative potential of cohesive and motivated teamwork. It

Oftentimes, the whole reason we became programmers in the first place is because we wanted to move beyond being a mere player and change the game, control it, modify its parameters, maybe even create...

7. Beware of comparison shopping

5. Pay now and consume later

Even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age four, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. The

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

I’m constantly running across comments from developers who don’t seem to understand that the code already tells us how it works; we need the comments to tell us why it works. Code comments

The toughest thing in life is not learning a bunch of potentially hypothetically useful stuff, but figuring out what the heck it is you want to do.

The ultimate unit test is whether or not users want to use your application. All the other tests you write are totally irrelevant until you can get that one to pass.

Reading self-help advice from other people, however well-intentioned, is no substitute for getting your own damn work done. The

Being an expert isn't telling other people what you know. It's understanding what questions to ask, and flexibly applying your knowledge to the specific situation at hand. Being an expert means provid...

8. Follow the herd instead of your head

That's not to say that all software project management books are crap. Just most of them. One of the few that I've found compelling enough to finish is Johanna Rothman's Behind Closed Doors: Secrets o...

Let's say I was tasked with determining whether your software project will fail. With the responses to these three questions in hand, I can tell you with almost utter certainty whether your project wi...

Writing code? That's the easy part. Getting your application in the hands of users, and creating applications that people actually want to use—now that's the hard stuff.