Ward Cunningham Quotes

The next day, I’d be going home. Little did I know that, as I slept, the universe was already conspiring, like a table full of gossiping women, to help nudge me in the right direction to- ward my fate... or to my death.

Ward Cunningham’s wiki software.

Preacher Henry Ward Beecher said, “A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs. It is jolted by every pebble in the road. Good humor makes all things tolerable.

I can't tell you how much time is spent worrying about decisions that don't matter. To just be able to make a decision and see what happens is tremendously empowering, but that means you have to set up the situation such that when something does go wrong, you can fix it.

Thanks to Ward Cunningham, the computer programmer who designed the first wiki, the metaphor “technical debt” is now a well-understood concept. While you may be able to borrow time by writing quick and dirty code, you will eventually have to pay it back—with interest. Often this trade-off makes sense, but you will run into serious trouble if you fail to keep the trade-off in the front of your mind. There also exists a less understood parallel concept, which I will call management debt. Like technical debt, management debt is incurred when you make an expedient, short-term management decision with an expensive, long-term consequence. Like technical debt, the trade-off sometimes makes sense, but often does not. More important, if you incur the management debt without accounting for it, then you will eventually go management bankrupt.

Ward Cunningham in 2003. He said, ‘technical debt is what you feel the next time you want to make a change.

Until then (& I really do hate to admit this), I believed that everyone pretty much lived exactly the way we did where I grew up... at Reseda, California, USA. I thought everyone believed the same things, wanted the same things, read the same things, & thought the same things were funny. You grew up, got married, had children, & lived happily ever after. This was the way life worked. Ask Ozzie & Harriet, June & Ward Cleaver, Pollyanna's Aunt, or The Cunningham's. It seemed that's how it was for my parents, how it would be for me, & how it was everyone. But this couple lived in a way I'd never heard of, or imagined, & yet, it all seemed to work out fine.