Dreaming in Code Quotes

“The revolution has to be customised”
― Scott Rosenberg, Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software

“Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new. And then, of course, there is a corollary: The only software that's worth making is software that does something new.”
― Scott Rosenberg, Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software

“People write programs. That statement is worth pausing over. People write programs. Despite the field’s infatuation with metaphors like architecture and bridge-building and its dabbling in alternative models from biology or physics, the act of programming today remains an act of writing—of typing character after character, word after word, line after line.”
― Scott Rosenberg, Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software

“Students of the Windows 2000 source found more than four thousand references to “hacks.” In one explosion of typographical attention-getting, a programmer inserted this warning into the code: *!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *IF YOU CHANGE TABS TO SPACES, YOU WILL BE KILLED!! *!!!!DOING SO FUCKS THE BUILD PROCESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
― Scott Rosenberg, Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software

“The big challenge is, we have to constrain and mold our ambition level without losing the spark. The stuff I lose sleep over nigh is, how are we doing on this? We want to make progress as fast as possible without exploiting human resources. How do you move faster without killing people? How do you build a community around the project without losing design integrity? And how do we get on an arc that moves from benign dictatorship to more small-group democracy?”
― Scott Rosenberg, Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software