Clay Shirky Quotes

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

A typical software project can present more opportunities to learn from mistakes than some people get in a lifetime.

For heavens sake, if you haven’t gotten comfy with Agile techniques and thinking, get on it right now.

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.

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

You can't start a product simply by building it. You have to know why you're building it, and you might go down the wrong rabbit hole, waste time, and confuse things. Spending long afternoons with a sketchbook or talking through your ideas with other people can save a year in software development later on.

I kind of 'code-sketch,' where I get started with a project by actually writing the code for it and getting something up on the screen. Then I play around with it and see if it's any fun and change the parts that aren't.

The Titanic hit the iceberg not because they could not see it coming but because they could not change direction.

If I'm an entrepreneur and I have an idea, and I don't have the development talent around me but I need to find a developer, I would do my selection just like I would with hiring an employee.

I don't think I've ever worked on anything that wasn't way bigger than we expected. That's all the way back to working on fighting games at Paradox. Everything seems to balloon when more and more people get involved.

Art history and Elizabethan poetry don't employ workers; the arduous and tedious application of business sciences such as computer programming and accounting does.

I worked as a programmer for 16 years.

I'm agile.

When we launched the first version of Basecamp in 2004, we decided to build software for small companies just like us.

If the business were a play, Act One is, 'Woohoo, bright and bushy-tailed. We're going to make something great!' Act Two is, 'We're six months behind on back-end development.'

If you think you're doing everything right, then you have a tendency to stand pat.

Building the machine for 'Speed' was fun, as was working on the 'Spitfire' programme. They are programmes I enjoyed being on, but they are not my job.

Basically, I had a hard time getting anyone to want to make any of the features that I had written.

When you have large systems, it becomes almost impossible to make even very simple changes.

As you get to the end of the project you want to run all the tests cases against one version and make sure that you know that that version passed everything. And so as you get late in the project you get a little more conservative about making radical changes to the software.

A tendency to fly too straight at a goal, instead of circling around it, often carries one too far.

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 Wesnoth devs are good but not exceptionally so, and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++). Nevertheless our productivity, in terms of goals achieved per hour of work, is quite high.

Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world

Using the Product Development Waterfall diagram for Customer Development activities is like using a clock to tell the temperature. They both measure something, but not the thing you wanted.