Brianna Wu Quotes

There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.

This will surprise some of your readers, but my primary interest is not with computer security. I am primarily interested in writing software that works as intended.

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

The process of software development doesn't feel any better than it did a generation ago.

Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.

Some of these isolated applications that sit on one machine are a million lines of code. How do you deal with that? Most people have no way to wrap their head around it.

I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that. I'll just restart Apache every 10 requests.

"Legacy code" often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling.

Anyone can squash a bug but all professors of this world couldn't build one.

And, I think that is actually appropriate because I'm really not the world's best programmer, I think it's a good thing that I'm not touching the code.

If 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself: 'Dijkstra would not have liked this', well that would be enough immortality for me.

There is a strong movement towards increased accountability for software developers and software development organizations.

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.

Writing software is a very intense, very personal thing. You have to have time to work your way through it, to understand it. Then debug it.

I used Agitator on some code I had unit-tested, and it made me a better tester. As an Agitar Fellow, I look forward to the leverage of working with an outstanding organization as together we continue to improve the value of developer testing.

I have never written a line of commercial code in my life. Nor should I.

The most sought-after candidates in the world today by companies like mine are people who make computer software - there's a shortage of talent.

I know one business, and that's how to make software.

My list of basic tools is a partial answer to the question about what has changed: Over the past few years, large numbers of programmers have come to depend on elaborate tools to interface code with systems facilities.

I think it's a combination of technical and social factors that leads to all the defects in deployed software.

The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial chance of introducing another.

When I write software, I know that it will fail, either due to my own mistake, or due to some other cause.

I designed and developed an unbelievable number of applications early in my life.

So Chuck and I looked at that and we hacked on em for a while, and eventually we ripped the stuff out of em and put some of it into what was then called en, which was really ed with some em features.

An individual developer like me cares about writing the new code and making it as interesting and efficient as possible. But very few people want to do the testing.