Christen Press Quotes

Programming is not a science. Programming is a craft.

If you know how to make software, then you can create big things.

Software development is technical activity conducted by human beings.

The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.

I know one business, and that's how to make software.

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

I enjoy evangelizing Java. In my heart of hearts, I'm an engineer, and what makes me happy is building something that works and having someone use it. That's cool.

It's [programming] the only job I can think of where I get to be both an engineer and an artist. There's an incredible, rigorous, technical element to it, which I like because you have to do very precise thinking. On the other hand, it has a wildly creative side where the boundaries of imagination are the only real limitation.

Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry

I'm really good at making software for publishing.

People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.

Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.

Writing software is a very intense, very personal thing. You have to have time to work your way through it, to understand it. Then debug it.

I like writing code. I like building product. I like making things that people like.

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

Code writers, they are my idols.

A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.

Whether you draw diagrams that generate code or you type at a browser, you are coding.

I was a programmer.

I think the best developers can learn any language; if they are a good developer, they can learn whatever. But the raw talent, the ability to learn it and do it and demonstrate the ability is helpful.

As software engineers trained to turn ambiguity into absolutes and fuzzy requirements into ones and zeros, we had a 'eureka' moment when we realized that our training had broader, real-world applications.

Depending on the kind of code you write, depending on the kind of ideas you have, you can be creative in problem-solving and you can really make things work in a very gratifying way.

I would play games long enough to discover what games were doing and how they were doing it. And then I'd spend the rest of my time building.

We're the toolmakers. Our developers are the real creative geniuses.

I grew up as a computer scientist, and I've always been fascinated by algorithms.