Michael T. Nygard Quotes

#1. If your system is difficult or annoying to administer, it will be neglected, deprecated, and probably implemented incorrectly. It might even get sabotaged.

Michael T. Nygard

#2. Software design as taught today is terribly incomplete. It talks only about what systems should do. It doesn't address the converse - things systems should not do. They should not crash, hang, lose data, violate privacy, lose money, destroy your company, or kill your customers.

Michael T. Nygard

#3. Bugs will happen. They cannot be eliminated, so they must be survived instead.

Michael T. Nygard

#4. Integration points are the number-one killer of systems. Every single one of those feeds presents a stability risk.

Michael T. Nygard

#5. One of my favorite retailers has a release process that rivals a NASA launch sequence.

Michael T. Nygard

#6. Design with skepticism, and you will achieve resilience. Ask, "What can system X do to hurt me?" and then design a way to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge whatever wrench your supposed ally throws.

Michael T. Nygard

#7. See whether the DBA laughs at the queries If it doesn't pass the laugh test, it shouldn't go into production. Period.

Michael T. Nygard

#8. of The TCP/IP Guide [Koz05] or TCP/IP Illustrated [Ste93] open beside you for this type of activity!

Michael T. Nygard

#9. Keep reports out of production Reports can, and should, be served elsewhere. Don't jeopardize

Michael T. Nygard

#10. Most testers I've known are perverse enough that if you tell them the "happy path" through the application, that's the last thing they'll do. It should be the same with load testing.

Michael T. Nygard

#11. Want to guarantee nasty conflicts? Take a word with multiple, fuzzy, definitions, force people to strike an agreement on it, attach large amounts of money to it, and then watch them fight about it a year or two later.

Michael T. Nygard

#12. Things happen in production - bad things that you can't always predict. One

Michael T. Nygard

#13. True utility computing centers are on the horizon, but right now, the only real ones are a pale approximation of this vision. In the world that the other 99.9% of us inhabit, production systems are deployed to some relatively fixed set of resources. Applications

Michael T. Nygard