Eric Maskin Quotes

Extreme programming is an emotional experience.

The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it.

Responsible Development shares many practices with XP but the roots are different. Responsible Development's values are honesty, transparency, accountability and responsibility. These lead me to pairing, test-first, incremental design, continuous integration and so on because they support the values.

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

Organizations want small changes in functionality on a more regular basis. An organization like Flickr deploys a new version of its software every half hour. This is a cycle that feeds on itself.

One of the advantages of having to live with JUnit for 8 years is now we can look back and see which decisions we made worked nicely and which we would have done differently.

Many people think that open source projects are sort of chaotic and and anarchistic. They think that developers randomly throw code at the code base and see what sticks.

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.

Ultimately, every great endeavor consists of many little steps.

Start by thinking of the smallest possible action you could take; then, take it. Then, choose the next smallest action, and do that.

Take great comfort in knowing that ALL great feats are accomplished one small step at a time.

The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. Hence plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.

Start moving, a step at a time, step after step. The positive momentum will take you from there.

Small daily - seemingly insignificant - improvements and innovations lead to staggering achievements over time.

Developers, developers, developers, developers.

Small steps can help people make big changes to achieve what they really desire. That wish isn't going to go anywhere unless you do something about it. Every day, just do one thing. At the end of six months, you'll be somewhere.

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Progress is not accomplished in one stage.

A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.

You can get anywhere if you simply go one step at a time.

The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.

I set another goal, a reasonable, manageable goal that I could realistically achieve if I worked hard enough. I approached everything step by step.

Don't get locked up into the ultimate goal. Just concentrate on the next step.

Baby steps count, as long as you are going forward. You add them all up, and one day you look back and you'll be surprised at where you might get to.

There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of.