Software Engineering Proverbs

A list of proverbs, most not unique to me

• Naming things is the hardest problem in software engineering

• That new javascript framework will become old next month

• Nobody knows what a monad is

• making software simple is hard

• You will look at your code in 1 year and think “which idiot wrote this?”

• All data processing engines converge to SQL

• Software Incompleteness Theorem: no matter how much you test your code, you missed an edge case

• Clean code bases don’t exist

• For every software principle, there is always a practical use case where it makes sense to break the principle

• You won’t refactor it as a fast follow

• A few hours of planning can save you weeks of coding

• Good software doesn’t mean good business