Top 35 Andrew Hunt Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals. – Quarry worker’s creed.”

— Andrew Hunt

2. “Tools amplify your talent. The better your tools, and the better you know how to use them, the more productive you can be.”

— Andrew Hunt

3. “Every day, work to refine the skills you have and to add new tools to your repertoire.”

— Andrew Hunt

4. “In some ways, programming is like painting. You start with a blank canvas and certain basic raw materials. You use a combination of science, art, and craft to determine what to do with them.”

— Andrew Hunt

5. “A good idea is an orphan without effective communication.”

— Andrew Hunt

6. “The greatest of all weaknesses is the fear of appearing weak.”

— Andrew Hunt

7. “All software you write will be tested – if not by you and your team, then by the eventual users – so you might as well plan on testing it thoroughly.”

— Andrew Hunt

8. “One hundred years from now, our engineering may seem as archaic as the techniques used by medieval cathedral builders seem to today’s civil engineers, while our craftsmanship will still be honored.”

— Andrew Hunt

9. “A Pragmatic Programmer takes charge of his or her own career, and isn’t afraid to admit ignorance or error.”

— Andrew Hunt

10. “Pragmatic Programmers won’t sit idly by and watch their projects fall apart through neglect.”

— Andrew Hunt

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11. “We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.”

— Andrew Hunt

12. “Well, software doesn’t quite work that way. Rather than construction, software is more like gardening – it is more organic than concrete. You plant many things in a garden according to an initial plan and conditions. Some thrive, others are destined to end up as compost.”

— Andrew Hunt

13. “But while you can always write ‘spaghetti code’ in a procedural language, object-oriented languages used poorly can add meatballs to your spaghetti.”

— Andrew Hunt

14. “Great software today is often preferable to perfect software tomorrow. If you give your users something to play with early, their feedback will often lead you to a better eventual solution.”

— Andrew Hunt

15. “You Can’t Write Perfect Software. Did that hurt? It shouldn’t. Accept it as an axiom of life. Embrace it. Celebrate it. Because perfect software doesn’t exist. No one in the brief history of computing has ever written a piece of perfect software. It’s unlikely that you’ll be the first. And unless you accept this as a fact, you’ll end up wasting time and energy chasing an impossible dream.”

— Andrew Hunt

16. “By coding at a higher level of abstraction, you are free to concentrate on solving domain problems, and can ignore petty implementation details.”

— Andrew Hunt

17. “Often this is an orthogonality issue. When teams are organized with lots of overlap, members are confused about responsibilities. Every change needs a meeting of the entire team, because any one of them might be affected.”

— Andrew Hunt

18. “The amount of surprise you feel when something goes wrong is directly proportional to the amount of trust and faith you have in the code being run.”

— Andrew Hunt

19. “Don’t rely on the properties of things you can’t control.”

— Andrew Hunt

20. “Have you noticed how some project teams are efficient, with everyone knowing what to do and contributing fully, while the members of other teams are constantly bickering and don’t seem able to get out of each other’s way? Often this is an orthogonality issue. When teams are organized with lots of overlap, members are confused about responsibilities. Every change needs a meeting of the entire team, because any one of them might be affected.”

— Andrew Hunt

21. “Entropy is a term from physics that refers to the amount of “disorder” in a system.”

— Andrew Hunt

22. “Nothing is more dangerous than an idea if it’s the only one you have.”

— Andrew Hunt

23. “The DRY principle tells us to keep the low-level knowledge in the code, where it belongs, and reserve the comments for other, high-level explanations.”

— Andrew Hunt

24. “It is enough. This is the right place.” Brigham Young uttered those words when his wagon reached the mouth of Emigration Canyon and he gazed out at this valley.”

— Andrew Hunt

25. “Within the overall structure of a project there is always room for individuality and craftsmanship.”

— Andrew Hunt

26. “Don’t be like the frog. Keep an eye on the big picture. Constantly review what’s happening around you, not just what you personally are doing.”

— Andrew Hunt

27. “There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.”

— Andrew Hunt

28. “Most people assume that maintenance begins when an application is released, that maintenance means fixing bugs and enhancing features. We think these people are wrong.”

— Andrew Hunt

29. “All programs transform data, converting an input into an output. And yet when we think about design, we rarely think about creating transformations. Instead we worry about classes and modules, data structures and algorithms, languages and frameworks.”

— Andrew Hunt

30. “The best way to start fixing a bug is to make it reproducible. After all, if you can’t reproduce it, how will you know if it is ever fixed?”

— Andrew Hunt

31. “In the same way a woodworker invests the time in a jig, a programmer can build a code generator. Once built, it can be used throughout the life of the project at virtually no cost.”

— Andrew Hunt

32. “One of the cornerstones of the pragmatic philosophy is the idea of taking responsibility for yourself and your actions in terms of your career advancement, your project, and your day-to-day work.”

— Andrew Hunt

33. “Before you start to look at the bug, make sure that you are working on code that built cleanly – without warnings. We routinely set compiler warning levels as high as possible. It doesn’t make sense to waste time trying to find a problem that the computer could find for you! We need to concentrate on the harder problems at hand.”

— Andrew Hunt

34. “Everything emanated from the temple. On the northern side of the oval Salt Lake Valley, the earliest Mormon arrivals set aside ten acres for what they called Temple Square.”

— Andrew Hunt

35. “One broken window – a badly designed piece of code, a poor management decision that the team must live with for the duration of the project – is all it takes to start the decline. If you find yourself working on a project with quite a few broken windows, it’s all too easy to slip into the mindset of “All the rest of this code is crap, I’ll just follow suit.”

— Andrew Hunt