Tim Bray famous quotes

...wisdom is in large part the knowledge of how to avoid doing dumb things, and thus grows globally as a function of the published inventory of stupid mistakes.
-- Tim Bray

#Mistake #Stupid #Design

Free markets are a tool, free speech is a goal.
-- Tim Bray

#Goal #Speech #Tools

It's like this: The time between having an idea and its public launch is measured in days not months, weeks not years.
-- Tim Bray

#Ideas #Years #Months

The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don't know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise. This is true even when you factor in the greater flexibility and velocity of startups.
-- Tim Bray

#Community #Risk #Velocity

For heavens sake, if you haven’t gotten comfy with Agile techniques and thinking, get on it right now.
-- Tim Bray

#Thinking #Heaven #Technique

The SOAP stack is generally regarded as an embarrassing failure these days.
-- Tim Bray

#Soap #Embarrassing #These Days

All the PHP code I've seen in that experience has been messy, unmaintainable crap. Spaghetti SQL wrapped in spaghetti PHP wrapped in spaghetti HTML, replicated in slightly-varying form in dozens of places.
-- Tim Bray

#Html #Dozen #Spaghetti

Bloggers and other flavors of lone wolf are publishing heart-wrenching photo-essays from the front line of the recovery effort. Newspapers and TV networks? They're writing about the temperature of the water in some part (they don't specify which) of some damaged reactor, illustrating it with video screen grabs of machinery they don't understand enough to explain.
-- Tim Bray

#Recovery #Writing #Heart

When I was new, I didn't know where my career will go. Initially, my films were not even successful, but then I learned a lot from my mistakes.

People think computers will keep them from making mistakes. They're wrong. With computers you make mistakes faster.

Terence, this is stupid stuff: You eat your victuals fast enough; There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear, To see the rate you drink your beer. But oh, good Lord, the verse you make, It gives a chap the belly-ache. The cow, the old cow, she is dead; It sleeps well the horned head: We poor lads, 'tis our turn now To hear such tunes as killed the cow. Pretty friendship 'tis to rhyme Your friends to death before their time. Moping, melancholy mad: Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.

Women have in their natures something akin to owls and fireflies. While men grow stupid and sleepy towards evening, they become brighter and more open-eyed, and show a propensity to flit and sparkle under the light of chandeliers.

Educated: no. Stupid: yes. And when I say "stupid," I mean stupid fresh.

People are stupid. There's a lot of dumb stuff that's successful.

We could have made it to the Arizona border in a few more hours if we hadn't been distracting each other with stupid little arguments. Don't get me wrong; I liked J.Lo fine. I've made that bed. But I'm not sure there's a person in the world I could be with twenty-four hours a day for three weeks without getting a little snippy. If I ever meet such a person, I'm marrying them.

…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew….

Design should do the same thing in everyday life that art does when encountered: amaze us, scare us or delight us, but certainly open us to new worlds within our daily existence.

Whether it's the experiments on 'MythBusters' or my earlier work in special effects for movies, I've regularly had to do things that were never done before, from designing complex motion-control rigs to figuring out how to animate chocolate.