Tim Bray Quotes & Sayings

Enterprise Systems, I mean. And not just a little bit, either. Orders of magnitude wrong. Billions and billions of dollars worth of wrong. Hang-our-heads-in-shame wrong. It's time to stop the madness. — Tim Bray

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

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

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

It's not going to be easy; Enterprise IT has spent decades growing a defensive culture based on the premise that you only get noticed when you screw up, so that must be avoided at all costs. — Tim Bray

Publishing a protocol under the name Atom that tries to capture all of the prior art in this stage and might provide a good basis for winding down the syndication wars. — Tim Bray

If you crank the pedantry and purism up, the Web is about URIs and REST. If you crank the controversy down, the Web is about using HTTP for your network traffic. And if you ask an actual non-geek human, the Web means there are links and forms and a "Back" button. — Tim Bray

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

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

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

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

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