noun : an accumulation of loose stones or rocky debris lying on a slope or at the base of a hill or cliff.
The examples can go on forever, but the principle becomes clear: when there’s an obstacle, don’t go around it. Don’t run from it. Go into it. Work with it. Explore it. Learn how to be with it and deal with it, and you’ll have a skill for life.
And what’s more: you will no longer be limited by obstacles in your path.
~ Leo Babauta from, The Obstacle is the Path – Zen Habits Website
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When it comes to writing code, the number one most important skill is how to keep a tangle of features from collapsing under the weight of its own complexity. … [T]here’s always lots of state to keep track of, rearranging of values, handling special cases, and carefully working out how all the pieces of a system interact. To a great extent the act of coding is one of organization. Refactoring. Simplifying. Figuring out how to remove extraneous manipulations here and there.
~ James Hague from, Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry
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The center of your application is not the database. Nor is it one or more of the frameworks you may be using. The center of your application are the use cases of your application.
~ Bob Martin from, Clean Coder Blog
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We, like all living things, want to live on — we want to project ourselves into the future, we have this will to live. And yet, unlike other living things, we have to live in a knowledge that this will is going to be thwarted, that we’re going to die. And so we might have to live with this sense of personal apocalypse — the worst thing that could possibly happen, will. This is what it means to be mortal.
~ Maria Popova from, The Philosophy of Immortality – The Marginalian
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They are two different things, and yet, what if we could have the vacation mind while working? We’d have to toss out the lazing around and the margaritas, but the mindset could be the same. The result would be a saner way of living, where we aren’t “working for the weekend” or looking forward to the little vacation time we have, but instead are happier throughout the week.
~ Leo Babauta from, The Practice of Work Mind & Vacation Mind, Simultaneously – Zen Habits Website
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As aspiring Software Craftsmen we are raising the bar of professional software development by practicing it and helping others learn the craft. Through this work we have come to value…
~ Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship from, http://manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org
Over time, the ideal of craftsmanship was cordoned off to just the technical arts. Physicians and legislators no longer thought of themselves as craftsmen, but as philosophers and natural scientists who were more concerned with the theoretical as opposed to the practical. Such a shift is a shame, for the principles of craftsmanship truly do apply to every man, whether he makes furniture or crunches numbers.
~ Brett McKay from, Applying the Ethos of the Craftsman to Our Everyday Lives | The Art of Manliness
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Try to ask a doctor or any engineer to do a crappy job in order to reduce costs. Engineers can change product’s materials to cheaper ones, they can change product’s final characteristics, but they don’t change their level of attention and their process of doing things the way they think it’s right. Doctors can perform simpler or different procedures by patient request, impacting somehow on the final result, but the attention, caring and cleanliness will be the same.
~ Caio Fernando Bertoldi Paes de Andrade from, Perception that high quality equals Rolls Royce
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6th gen prog lang: when you yell to a co-worker, “yo! email me that binary.”
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The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — sonder
Urban Dictionary: sonder
sonder – Wiktionary, the free dictionary
The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own — populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness — an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
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Inevitably, if you are doing some kind of traditional Japanese martial arts, you will encounter the term te no uchi. In its narrowest context, it means how you grip your weapon. In a larger context, it means a kind of overall skill level for a craftsman.
~ Wayne Muromoto from, 75. Te No Uchi: Skill At Arms – The Classic Budoka
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An old Unix master came to Master Wq. “I am troubled, Wq. You teach the way of Vim. vi is holy but Vim is not; its code sprawls, its features crowd memory; its binaries are vast, its behavior inconsistent. This is not the way of Unix. I fear you mislead your students. What can be done?”
Master Wq nodded. “You are right,” he said. “Vim is broken. Let us fix it. Shall we begin?”
~ Tom Ryder from, Vim Kōans | Arabesque
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