Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

by Peter Seibel

We shipped—that was the bottom line.

But that's not the point—you're not here to write code; you're here to ship products.

As they say, it's easier to optimize correct code than to correct optimized code.

think that people who say, “Oh, it's not worth the time; it's just the name of a variable,” just don't get it. You're not going to produce a maintainable program with that attitude.

But I think a big sin in our area, in engineering, is doing stuff just because it's neat, because it's good engineering, whatever. If you're not solving real problems for real users—in this case, Java programmers—then you shouldn't add the feature.

to be an entrepreneur you need to get energy from stressful situations involving money, whereas my energy is sapped by stressful situations involving money.

I had two convictions, which actually served me well: that programs ought to make sense and there are very, very few inherently hard problems. Anything that looks really hard or tricky is probably more the product of the programmer not fully understanding what they needed to do and pounding it with a hammer 'til they got code that looked like it did the right thing.

Simplified it is like this: only two percent of the world's population is born to be super programmers. And only two percent of the population is born to be super writers.