Eric S. Raymond Quotes

Creeping featurism is a disease, fatal if not treated promptly. There are some cures, but, as usual, the best approach is to practice preventative medicine.

The process of software development doesn't feel any better than it did a generation ago.

I work on OpenBSD fulltime, as the project leader. I set some directions, increase communication between the developers, and try to be involved in nearly every aspect of the base system.

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

Software development is technical activity conducted by human beings.

You can’t really understand the challenges involved with any major tech project until you start trying to build it.

Like any well designed software product, Windows is designed, developed and tested as an integrated whole.

I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that. I'll just restart Apache every 10 requests.

The most fundamental problem in software development is complexity. There is only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer

If we're trying to build a world-class News Feed and a world-class messaging product and a world-class search product and a world-class ad system, and invent virtual reality and build drones, I can't write every line of code. I can't write any lines of code.

The problem is, in software design, often the consequences of your decisions don't become apparent for years.

Extreme programming is an emotional experience.

We shifted our philosophy from being a computer mapping group that would support planners to the idea of building actual software that would be well engineered. Because at that time, our software was not well-engineered at all; it was basically built with project funding and for project work, largely by ourselves.

There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.

There is a strong movement towards increased accountability for software developers and software development organizations.

This will surprise some of your readers, but my primary interest is not with computer security. I am primarily interested in writing software that works as intended.

My background was computer science and business school, so eventually I worked my way up where I was running product groups - development, testing, marketing, user education.

I think it's a combination of technical and social factors that leads to all the defects in deployed software.

I designed and developed an unbelievable number of applications early in my life.

Building technical systems involves a lot of hard work and specialized knowledge: languages and protocols, coding and debugging, testing and refactoring.

Early in my career, I was involved with engineer-led projects, where designers came in late in the game and were expected to put lipstick on an existing code base. This almost never works.

In any software work, you have IT consultancy competence required to build the systems.

It's something special being able to build a program up.

In software engineering, we have the term 'technical debt.' When you don't do a job correctly, unaddressed problems become harder and harder to solve.

Systems program building is an entropy-decreasing process, hence inherently metastable. Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.