Today I read the Cathedral and Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond. It has nice quotes especially for open source programmers but equally holds true for closed source programmers also. Here are the quotes:
1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.
2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
3. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
4. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
5. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
6. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
7. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
8. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
9. If you treat your beta-testers as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
10. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
11. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
12. Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
13. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
14. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
myself and my computer 