cc

"Whatever new language or paradigm doesn't kill you makes you stronger"

-szecs, 2013

The pinnacle of programming is mastering the remotes for your entertainment systems

-Stormynature, 2013

It sounds a little generic and overused but after you've had to refactor several projects and subsequently write them from the ground up, you'll think twice before coding the idea that sounded awesome in your head.

right on! My first ACB ran seeemingly well, until i realized it had a core architecture flaw. Some replanning, and now its 200 times faster and now manages my behavior forest for my game AI

Which leads me to one of my favorite quotes:

"Plans are Nothing; Planning is Everything"

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

and a personal favorite corilary of mine:

"Agile is Nothing without Planning, unless you like getting to crap fast"

-NetGnome, 2013

"In time you will come to hate the users; might as well get ahead of the game on that..."

A rule which everyone should be following; "Trust in the Rob, the Rob is good..." based on the recent trend of I suggest something, this is dismissed in favour of another idea, 2 months later it has been refactored to what I first suggested...

Damn it, copy & paste!!!

me.

Design patterns are descriptive, not prescriptive. Treating them as if it were the other way around (in my experience) generally leads to over-engineering.

A few on optimisation:

"Make it work. Make it right. Then make it fast"

- Kent Beck (I think)

"The First Rule of Program Optimization: Don't do it. The Second Rule of Program Optimization (for experts only!): Don't do it yet."

— Michael A. Jackson

On debugging:

"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place.
So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, you are by definition not smart enough to debug it"

- Brian Kernighan

(paraphrased, because I'm too lazy to find the exact quote)

and on that note....

"Laziness is a virtue. A truly lazy programmer will do an immense amount of work just to avoid doing a small amount of work over and over again. This is a Good Thing (tm)."

- ChaosEngine

As with music, technical proficiency will only carry you so far. At some point you have to have a connection with your users, and those who must maintain your code; never neglect your social empathy in the pursuit to be a better technician.

Throw away prototype code.