A very short quote I came across to start your week off and get you thinking about technology with the correct frame of reference:

“As to the methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Mr. Emerson would surely have made a great developer. We need to heed his advice.

As an exercise: think of how many different “methods” you can think of and then think of how many “principles” you can come up with.

Principles:

• Single Responsibility Principle
• Don’t Repeat Yourself
• Dependency Inversion Principle
• Liskov Substitution Principle
• Open Closed Principle
• Interface Segregation Principle

Methods:

• ASP.NET
• C# 2.0
• C# 3.0
• LINQ
• LINQ to SQL
• Entity Framework
• NHibernate
• SOA
• StructureMap
• Windsor/MicroKernel
• Ninject
• ASP.NET MVC
• Ruby
• IronRuby
• W*F
• Silverlight
• And on and on and on…

“As to the methods there may be a million, but principles are few.”