My Top 10 Programming Proverbs

I cross-posted this post on my personal blog.

A little while back, I started a repo of funny (and insightful!) programming quotes and proverbs. These often take a shape of an existing proverbs (like Rome wasn't built in a day) and get translated to be tech-relevant and hopefully give you a good chuckle (like Facebook wasn't built in a day). Protip: You can put these into Slack as the loading/intro messages. :)

Without further ado, here are my favorites to brighten your day:

When you reach wizened-engineer level, there are at least a hundred wizened engineers above you.

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A deployed MVP is worth two prototyped.

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Sleep on a force push.

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Sometimes you have to cut legacy support to allow the new product to bloom.

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Good test coverage + automated workflows = quiet cell phones and better sleep.

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There is no test without first a failure

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Anger and stubborness make bad allies in code review

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With commit and deploy access comes great responsibility

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Don't put all your logic in one method basket

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A foreach loop avoided is a CPU cycle earned.

Comments

[Ryan Palo]

I like

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Followed by

If you say you don’t like code because it is too slow, I say show me the benchmark that proves the extra complexity is worth it.

And

Think twice about writing code for potential future features. It usually makes your current feature code more complicated, and you double your work if you are wrong about what features are coming.

And slight shameless self-quote:

Write code using methods you wish you had. Then go write those methods.

[Andreas Jakof]

That’s how I write code. 😎
First run is usually something like Pseudocode in VS, using methods that not yet exist but lining the rough path.

And then the tedious work.
Next run, the same for each of the not yet existing methods.
And so on... until all methods do, what they are supposed to.

[Antonin J. (they/them)]

Go to the quotes repo and open up a PR for that self-quote!

[Jack Harner 🚀]

With commit and deploy access comes great responsibility

My Favorite

[Lars Klopstra ⚡]

Shouldn't that be merge instead of commit tho?

[Antonin J. (they/them)]

I guess that depends! I was thinking more about not being able to push to master unless you have that permission.

[Amber Wilkie]

Make it work, make it right, make it fast.

[Andreas Jakof]

Amen!

[Dennis Lahay]

"Working code is better than good looking code."

[Antonin J. (they/them)]

Not listed but one of my other favorites:

What happens in Git stays in Git

[David Wickes]

Antonin - you may enjoy these Perl(i)s of wisdom

[Eugene Karataev]

There is also The Zen of Python

[Antonin J. (they/them)]

I know! There are tons of these. :)

[Javier Aguirre]

Leave the camp better than you found it, it applies to programming and almost everything in life 😁

[Drozerah]

Get app, stand app, stand app for your app! Get app, stand app, don't give up the fight!

[Antonin J. (they/them)]

Is this Dr. Seuss? 😂

[Drozerah]

Keep it secret !

[Noah Hornberger]

If you don't know how to solve the problem, stop typing. It's not funny, but it saves lots of time.

[gdcohen]

My favorite: "There are 10 kinds of people. Those who understand binary and those who don't".