If you have ever met me personally at a presentation, or during consulting, or have read some of my blogs, publications or books the following statements are things I have been known to say.

“You cannot outscale bad design.”

“I focus on delivering a consistent and rewarding consumer relationship.”

“Do Less Work”.  
(blank stares)  
“Let me explain with more detail. Efficiency — Doing less repetitive work.”

“Disaster is inevitable. Total failure is avoidable”.

The first sentence of this I have stated for many years. While mentioning this in discussion about my third book with my editor Paul Carlstroem, he helped me to realize and therefore refine this quote with the second sentence.

Question:  “What is Testing?”
Answer: “Testing is not about seeing if your software works; testing is all about trying to break your software.”

“When reviewing the performance of a piece of code (or SQL statement); the first objective should not be to make it better; the first objective should be to eliminate it.”

“No one cares about your backup; they only care if you can restore.”

Adapated from W. Curtis Preston – Backup & Recovery (O’Reilly, 2009)

“Work towards being proactive, rather than reactive.”

“Frameworks generally suck.
They CLAIM to improve speed of development and abstract the need to know SQL.
The REALITY is the undocumented cost to sub-optimal performance, especially with data persistence.”

“The greatest performance overhead in MySQL systems today is the lack of SQL skills and general development skills by the software creators.”

“There is a time you have to call a spade a spade (i.e. a blunt object), when what you require is a scalpel (i.e. a fine precision object).

You have two choices. You can continue to dig an ever bigger hole for which there will never will be a solution to your problem, or you accept you need to learn how to build scalpels and you just start [painfully] at the beginning.”