Quotes

Just a thought it would be prudent to give credit for the name of my blog; this phrase was uttered by my good friend Bernie Odoy.

We were feeling pretty punchy one day and were just amazed that how sometimes what we say does not seem to have any impact on those it was said to. Does this happen to anyone else or is it just us? So in a moment of extreme sarcasm Bernie uttered this quote – Sometimes words mean something. I realized its brilliance immediately and wrote it down on a post-it and stuck it to my monitor. That was two employers and 4 years ago.

Here are some of my other favorite quotes on my board of fame. No one famous; just a bunch of people I have worked with over the years and maybe one or two of my own (I have no idea where this is going).

“If you say something and no one hears you. Did you really say anything?” This too was uttered by Bernie. I am not sure that it was said on the same day as the previous quote, but certainly has the same sentiment.

“It’s either Wrox or it’s Box”. This is a quote by yours truly. I used to teach a lot of classes and this one was uttered in response to a question an attendee asked me. They asked me what the difference is between the two books – a book published by Wrox (a technical publisher) or another book (I don’t remember the titles and that’s probably a good thing to protect the guilty). At the time I was not a big fan of books published by Wrox; nothing personal, but they just seemed to be a book factory and the quality suffered because of that. So I was comparing a book published by Wrox to a book written by someone else who was all about quality - Don Box. Don is this really cool down to earth dude who also happens to be really smart and articulate - leathal combination. Don had a way of presenting information with layers; so no matter your “level” you would walk away with something. That takes skill and time; two things that you don’t get when you are rushing a book to market. So I was trying to say that either you get something quick or you get quality. Hmmm, I seem to recall telling some project managers I have worked with in the past the same thing…

“…It’s still a collection; it’s just that it’s a collection of one”. My good friend Greg Manto gets credit for this one. At the time we were working at Microsoft (as consultants) and Greg, Bernie and I were all on the same engagement together. We were building this object model for our client written entirely in VB4. Yikes! We were in a design meeting discussing how to implment this one class and Greg uttered this quote. He did not mean to imply that everything is a collection, but rather that just because you only have one does not mean that it is NOT a collection. He went on to say that if there is a good chance that there will be more than one in the future make it a collection today; so that the object model does not need to be changed to accomodate this in the future. You can use defaults and shortcut properties to make getting to the most common element in a collection easy. It is something that has stuck with me ever since and I get a chuckle every time pull it out of the archives.

I realize these are never going to make to the quote hall of fame; but they were uttered by some code warriors in the heat of battle. In my book, that makes them pretty good.

By the way, I still have the original post-it.