The Complete #CowboyDeveloper

Actual quotes. And yes, each and every quote said with no trace of irony whatsoever.

• “I don’t need requirements — I know what I’m doing”
• “Look at all the code I wrote!”
• “I don’t see why I need to write tests for it — *I* wrote this, and it works.”
  (also ref)
• “Unit tests are a waste of time”
• “I don’t worry about code coverage — that’s what the QA group is for”
• “*I* understand the error message, and that’s good enough. After all, I’m the only one that can fix it.”
• “Nobody here is qualified enough to review my code”
• “I hand-tuned the code till it was reliable, we won’t need to worry about it any more”
  (also ref)
• “If I didn’t derive it from first principles, it is received wisdom”
  (this one is a paraphrase)
• “That won’t work because …”
  (response to any new idea that he didn’t come up with)
• “We don’t need vector clocks, we’ve got ntp”
• “I don’t like functional programming, I prefer methods”
• “The only problem with my <system that I’ve spent years on> is that the network won’t reliably deliver messages”
• The tools I use are, by definition, the best tools for the job.
  (paraphrase of comments about every tool ever used by him)
• “I don’t care what the term means in other contexts — *I* think it means <something wildly different>, and thats good enough for us”
• “The code is the documentation”
• “Documentation sounds like Communism”
• “It’s too complex to document”
• “Dunning-Kruger is bullshit”
  (another paraphrase)
• “Process is bullshit — it gets in my way”
• “I am one of the top 15 experts in the world in this field”
  (no he isn’t)
• “Locking is easy — just use a mutex”
• “That FLP paper is wrong — my code proves that. Almost. I just have to tweak it a bit more”
• It only matters when it affects me
  (this isn’t a quote, it refers to behavior)
• “We use levelDB because it’s fast”
  (followed by incoherent rambling where ‘fast’ is never actually defined)
• “We store everything as JSON, that way we don’t worry about schema”
• “Blockchains have nothing to do with distributed systems”
• “Don’t worry about the big picture — I’ve got that. You just focus on your part”
  (also ref)
• “I already have enough logging, tracing is just redundant”
• “You can use logging for everything!”
• “Netsplits are rare, so I don’t think about them”

(This article also appears on my blog)