Top 12 Developer Quotes from QCon New York

Just to be clear, I didn’t actually attend QCon New York this year. But after the experience of attending QCon San Francisco in 2010, I never forget the many great quotes you’ll find on Twitter. This time was no different.

• "Distributed objects failed; for very good reasons. Values rule on the wire" by Rich Hickey in his session on The Value of Values.
  
  

• “People don't change, they don't want to be accountable whether agile or not” by Jeff Pattond in his talk on Co-Making Great Products.
  
  

• “If you think writing code is hard, try making product decisions” also by Jeff Pattond.
  
  

• "You only hire the Best and the Brightest? Really? Who is then hiring the Worst and the Dimmest?", something that was said during a panel discussion.
  
  

• “Mud takes away our ability to do good design”, by Eric Evans in his talk Four Strategies for Recovering the Ability to Design When Surrounded by Messy Legacy.
  
  

• "Refactoring is good at changing order, not fundamentals. You can't convert a hotel into a stadium”, also by Eric Evans
  
  

• “Empowering is a middle management word that means pretending to let people do things, and then preventing that”, by Mike Hill in his talk on How Individuals Help Teams Become Excellent.
  
  

• “Watching someone do work is not pairing”, also by Mike Hill
  
  
  
  

As you can expect from somebody like Michael Feathers, he made some great quotes in his talk on Patterns of Software Change.

• “Architecture - the part of the system that you can not replace without having a different system”
  
  

• "Over-engineering = weighting a possible future too highly in design."
  
  

• “Code Turbulance”, a name for frequently changed code
  
  

• “Anytime you manage by the numbers, instead of actually (God forbid) looking at the code a way will be found to game the numbers”, in a discussion on the uselessness of using only code metrics for judging the quality of your code base.
  
  
  

Looking forward to QCon San Francisco in November…