Quotes: SE Radio 148 - Software Archeology w/ Dave Thomas

The Teutonic Technology podcast that's always worth a listen...

Dave Thomas: 2:40 - "Everyone spends all their time trying to figure out how write code... Very few people spend any time at all working out how best to read code, and that's a really big mistake. Because if you think about it because the average software developer probably spends 20% of their time writing code and the rest of the time reading it. and yet the training is totally the other way around..."

Dave Thomas: 4:50 - "If you think about any other creative profession, ... a writer or a painter. You certainly don't just sit there and write or paint. If you're a writing student, you'll be reading other peoples work. In fact most of your work will be reading the great classics, reading what other people of done and seeing how other people have constructed books... If you're a painter, you'll spend time studying other painters and yet if you're a software developer, you never read anybody else's code. You spend your entire time writing your own, which is an incredibly arrogant approach to the profession."

Dave Thomas: 25:10 - "If you are doing serious code archeology, you owe it to yourself to learn the command line, because you can not do it as effectively inside an IDE."

Dave Thomas: 27:00 - "You could always spot a team that has bought a copy of "Design Patterns" because they can't write "Hello Word" without three decorators a visitor and ... Alot of people misunderstood what patterns were. Everybody thought patterns were like software Lego, and I'll construct my software by building it out of a whole bunch of patterns and that totally misses the point. Patterns are not a construction device, they are a way of dealing with common issues when you're writing code. They are idioms, they are not designs."