Quotes About Complexity

She was neither beautiful nor ugly. Neither loving nor vicious. Neither wicked nor good. She was all of those things. We all are.

A veces se gana, otras se pierde. Y a veces se gana y pierde al mismo tiempo. La vida es un jodido desastre

Add another piece to the puzzle." "Am I really such a puzzle?" "Yes, but I've always enjoyed puzzles.

But maybe we were both wrong, and both right. It's not either or, not luck or love. Not fate or will. Maybe for double happiness, you need both.

Every hero is a villain, and every villain is a hero. It just depends on who you ask.

She's beauty and she's the beast, rolled into one.

All I want from a man is everything and nothing at the same but different times, sometimes and never but always.

Emotional entanglements are messy. And if I don't get involved, I don't have to worry about getting hurt. -SHAYE

She wasn't easy to be around at the best of times, and during the worst, well, she sucked flaming balls of mean...Still she wanted his eternal admiration.

He was her boyfriend, but not really her boyfriend, even though technically he was, in fact, her boyfriend, even though he wasn't truly her boyfriend. Whatever. It made sense in her head.

Not every story has explosions and car chases. That's why they have nudity and espionage.

It's like the free puppy," I continue. "It's not the upfront capital that kills you, it's the operations and maintenance on the back end." Chris cracks up. "Yes, exactly! They'll say, 'The puppy can't quite do everything we need. Can you train it to fly airplanes? It's just a simple matter of coding, right?

the systems most prone to failure are also our most important and are at the epicenter of our most urgent changes. When

Much of my career has involved rewrites of critical systems. You would think such a thing is easy—just make the new one do what the old one did. Yet they are always much more complex than they seem, and overflowing with risk. The big cut-over date looms, and the pressure is on. While new features (there are always new features) are liked, old stuff has to remain. Even old bugs often need to be added to the rewritten system.

This is the reality of operating complex systems; no single person can see the whole system and understand how all the pieces fit together.

For Phoenix, it takes us three or four weeks for new developers to get builds running on their machine, because we've never assembled the complete list of the gazillion things you need installed in order for it to compile and run. But now all we have to do is check out the virtual machine that Brent and team built, and they're all ready to go.

Maybe not," I say. "I'll tell you what I do know, though. Every time that we let Brent fix something that none of us can replicate, Brent gets a little smarter, and the entire system gets dumber.

When we have a tightly-coupled architecture, small changes can result in large scale failures. As

But that's like throwing gasoline on the fire. Developers are even worse than networking people. Show me a developer who isn't crashing production systems, and I'll show you one who can't fog a mirror.

Technology keeps changing faster and faster, and it's nearly impossible to keep up anymore.

a system where small teams of engineers are able to work productively and independently of each other, with components painstakingly and splendidly isolated from each other, instead of being complected into a giant, ugly, knotty mess.

In tightly coupled and complected systems, it's nearly impossible to change anything, because you can't just change one area of the code, you must change one hundred, or even a thousand, areas of the code. And even the smallest changes can cause wildly unpredictable effects in distant parts of the system, maybe in something you've never even heard of.

We're like the Bates Motel of changes," I say in disbelief. "Changes go in but never come out. Within a month, we'll have thousands of changes that we'll be carrying around, all competing to get implemented.

It's not a good sign when they're still attaching parts to the space shuttle at liftoff time.