15 proverbs for the mindful developer

• By GCN Staff
• Apr 02, 2015

Coding and programming, many developers will tell you, are a way of life as much as a job.   So Antonin Januska began compiling the Programmer's Proverbs – a crowdsourced compilation of life lessons that lives, naturally, in a GitHub repository.  

GCN's 15 favorites are listed below.  Additions can be made, and the full list accessed via API, here.

1. Deploying an unmonitored app is like going on a road trip without a gas gauge.
2. More hours worked, more commits made. Mostly reverts and bug-causing features.
3. Scope creep makes a mountain.
4. Sometimes you have to cut legacy support to allow the new product to bloom.
5. "Just ship" is no substitute for design.
6. You cannot prevent managers from asking too much of you, but you can prevent them from getting used to it.
7. Testing is easier than debugging.
8. Laziness is your best friend.  Never do twice what you can automate once.
9. The better job you do, the easier others discount the level of difficulty.
10. Any sufficiently complex app architecture is indistinguishable from spaghetti code.
11. An early BETA launch will teach you more than a delayed promise.
12. One thing should never do more than one thing.
13. A marketer is not a QA, a developer does not advertise.
14. Writing requirements-based code and walking on water are both relatively easy to do when frozen.
15. Don't commit on master when drunk.