Tim Bray Quotations

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

From the point of view of the company, it has been really all upside: the costs have been low, there haven't been any problems and it has been a huge business success,

I think it's going to have an impact.

The total numbers (of fake sites) must be mind-boggling... The software that's generating these things is pretty sophisticated; you might think (the sites) were real at first glance.

For many years before the Web there were many different ways of publishing information. There were many different ways of doing hypertext. There were many different ways of doing online information retrieval and search, and navigation,

These tools are changing the basic core economics of software development.

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

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

Free markets are a tool, free speech is a goal.

...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.

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.

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.