But you might not get it. ** groan ** Seriously though, I've had one crazy month and could use a good laugh (not like that bad one above). James Iry's A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages is chock full of some hilariously nerdy humor. 1972 - Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix.

The Commandments of Good Code according to Zach™ Treat your code the way you want other’s code to treat you All (ok most) programming languages are simultaneously good and bad Good code is easily read and understood, in part and in whole Good code has a well thought out layout & architecture to make managing state obvious Good code doesn’t reinvent the wheel, it stands on the shoulders of giants Don’t cross the streams!

From Why Does Software Spoil by Jeff Atwood I love the prospect of upgrading my favorite software. Done right, it's like watching a caterpillar shed its skin and become a beautiful butterfly. Or at least a decent-looking moth. But for some software packages, something goes terribly, horribly wrong during the process of natural upgrade evolution. Instead of becoming better applications over time, they become worse. They end up more bloated, more slow, more complex, more painful to use.

Zawinski's Law from the Jargon File: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. Possibly inspired by "The Law of Software Development and Envelopment" at MIT: Every program in development at MIT expands until it can read mail. While humorous, it reflects the pressure of programs to expand and evolve into platforms. At Octoblu, we succumbed to this pressure early and can not only read email (or SMS, or push notifications, or…), but can even automatically generate it from your brain waves.

Gerald Weinberg in Becoming a Technical Leader One kind of trouble is that when change doesn’t fit our model, we try to stop it from happening. When faced with change, we may feel paralyzed and helpless. People holding to organic models need security just as much as anyone else, but they obtain their security by taking risks and by tolerating ambiguity. Under the influence of the threat/ reward model, we may try to assure our security by struggling to keep all people and relationships forever the same.