Software Development Quote of the Day
Notes on the Google Gadget
Reading a post on Reddit made we want an RSS feed that would serve up a cool quote every day on my iGoogle home page. (Sigh - "iGoogle" - What a stupid name. But it isn't a bad technology.) I was surprised that I couldn't easily find one already made so I decided to do it myself. I started building an Atom feed, which would have made it a more generic app, but I didn't want to worry about it getting popular and having to pay for bandwidth. (I'd rather be happy if other people ending up using it.) All I wanted it for was my google home page anyhow so I chose their platform. They have a nice little system that even includes a google gadget to make google gadgets.
I felt that quotes about programming was a little too narrow of a topic, so I decided to widen the focus to all of software development. That way I could include quotes about design, hardware, project management - anything that might be relevant to a person who creates computer applications.
To harvest as many good quotes as I could, I started with the quotes archive at cat-v.org and a 101 Great Programming Quotes page at DevTopics. I spent some time at Wikiquote pages for programming, computers, Fred Brooks, Steve Jobs, Charles Babbage and others. I found over 150 (so far) that I felt were worthy, or at least made me laugh.
You can adjust the settings of the gadget to serve a new quote each day, or a random one every time it loads.