Quotes from Andrew Hunt

Plan what you want to say. Write an outline. Then ask yourself, Does this get across whatever I'm trying to say? Refine it until it does.

You're communicating only if you're conveying information.

The more effective that communication, the more influential you become.

Commenting source code gives you the perfect opportunity to document those elusive bits of a project that can't be documented anywhere else: engineering trade-offs, why decisions were made, what other alternatives were discarded, and so on.

If you use plain text to create synthetic data to drive system tests, then it is a simple matter to add, update, or modify the test data without having to create any special tools to do so. Similarly, plain text output from regression tests can be trivially analyzed (with diff, for instance) or subjected to more thorough scrutiny with Perl, Python, or some other scripting tool.

I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned. Richard Feynman

Make what you're saying relevant in time, as well as in content. Sometimes all it takes is the simple question Is this a good time to talk about...?

You work small miracles every day.

In 1897, Indiana State Legislature House Bill No. 246 attempted to decree that henceforth ? should have the value of 3. The Bill was tabled indefinitely at its second reading when a mathematics professor pointed out that their powers did not quite extend to passing laws of nature.

Gain familiarity with the shell, and you'll find your productivity soaring.

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea if it's the only one you have. • Emil-Auguste Chartier, Propos sur la religion, 1938

There's one technique that you must use if you want people to listen to you: listen to them.

There are certain tips and tricks that apply at all levels of software development, ideas that are almost axiomatic, and processes that are virtually universal. However, these approaches are rarely documented as such; you'll mostly find them written down as odd sentences in discussions of design, project management, or coding.

Unless you work in a vacuum, you need to be able to communicate. The more effective that communication, the more influential you become.

Show them a glimpse of the future and you'll get them to rally around.

Don't let entropy win.

Pragmatic Programmers don't shirk from responsibility. Instead, we rejoice in accepting challenges and in making our

Developers who don't actively think about their code are programming by coincidence—the code might work, but there's no particular reason why.

The O() notation puts an upper bound on the value of the thing we're measuring (time, memory, and so on).

As programmers, we collect, organize, maintain, and harness knowledge. We document knowledge in specifications, we make it come alive in running code, and we use it to provide the checks needed during testing.

Software defects manifest themselves in a variety of ways, from misunderstood requirements to coding errors.

knowledge isn't stable. It changes—often rapidly.

Estimates given at the coffee machine will (like the coffee) come back to haunt you.