Most likely Gide ("Croyez ceux qui cherchent la vérité, doutez de ceux qui la trouvent", "Believe those who seek Truth, doubt those who find it") and not Voltaire ;)
Voltaire was generally more subtle: "un bon mot ne prouve rien", a witty saying proves nothing, as he'd say.
Seconding this. It's an important book for all kinds of design
I would also recommend "Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship" by Robert C. Martin. It focuses on crafting higher quality code, which is the property of it not only running well, but being easy to understand and to work on
I personally don't like Clean Code, but understand that a lot of people I respect do. I do want to throw Clean Architecture into the ring though since we're in the topic.
That book is a top three software book for me. It made me understand why OO is a thing and what concepts I should pretty much always use from that ecosystem.
The concept of interfaces (not just the programming construct, but the general idea) was massive and it changed my view on the testability of code.
Martin has some other good stuff related to professionalism as a programmer. He has a few talks and The Clean Coder and those are absolutely worth it as well.
While the criticism is valid, I think it misses the points of the book. It's worth reading both but the book definitely has helpful perspectives that eclipse what's mentioned on that webpage
A few months back I posted an Ask HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16885344) trying to get general input on what people knew or thought about Oak Ridge National Lab, where I work as a data scientist and realized that the "if you post it they will come" approach wasn't really working well for our positions we were hiring for. There were a lot of great, brutally honest comments.
To summarize, there were 3 main categories of responses
- I’ve never heard of ORNL
- I’ve heard of ORNL and the national labs, but aren’t they just low paying government jobs?
- I’ve heard of ORNL, but I don’t really know about living in Tennessee
Based on this feedback, I tossed the existing job posting and rewrote this one to try and address, or at least acknowledge, the main points that were mentioned in the Ask HN.
If you are interested, let me know. The position is a part of my team so I should be able to answer any questions you might have. Also, general feedback on the posting itself would be great.
Very good point. I may wait a view days and try again with your title suggestion. I originally had "Ask HN: Software Engineers..." but I ran out of room.
