There are plenty of both formal and informal rules that programmers love to quote, either because they’re fun or quirky, or simply because they are useful and thought-provoking.

We’ve gathered some of the most interesting ones for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

The ninety-ninety rule

The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.

Hofstadter’s law

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account.

Brooks’s law

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

Lister’s law

People under time pressure don’t think faster.

The MoSCoW method

A technique to prioritize delivery requirements during development. MoSCoW stands for:

M – MUST have this.
S – SHOULD have this if at all possible.
C – COULD have this if it does not affect anything else.
W – WON’T have this time but WOULD like in the future.

The KISS principle

Keep It Simple, Stupid. In other words: avoid complexity, embrace simplicity.

Gall’s law

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.

Worse is better (New Jersey style)

Describes how a seemingly “inferior” product can be better from a user perspective. A limited but easy-to-use software may be more popular among users than a “better”, more comprehensive one.

Greenspun’s tenth rule

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

(A funny note is that there are no preceding rules, only the tenth. According to Philip Greenspun, this was because he was “just trying to give the rule a memorable name.”)

Zawinski’s law

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

Linus’s law

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

Murphy’s law

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

Sutton’s law

Go where the money is.

(When attempting to diagnose a problem, confirm the most likely diagnosis first (i.e. test the most likely solution first). Named after Bank robber Willie Sutton, who robbed banks “because that’s where the money is”.)

Wirth’s law

Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.

Conway’s law

Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.

(Interesting example of how this can cause problems: NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter crashed because one development team used English units while the other used metric units to control the thrusters.)

The Hollywood principle

Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

(Instead of your program running the system, the system runs your program.)

The Dilbert Principle

The most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.

Your favorite rule/law?

There are sure to be plenty of useful/funny/interesting development laws and rules we haven’t included here, so let us know in the comments if we missed your favorite!

Sources: Wikipedia for everything except Lister’s law which we found here.

Image credit: The always excellent Geek and Poke.

As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

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Want to be able to download a DVD worth of data in about 38 minutes? It may not seem very impressive, but that’s with the average Internet speed in South Korea, according to the latest “State of the Internet” report by Akamai.

Covering Q3 2011, the report again puts South Korea at the top of the list of countries with the fastest Internet connections. The country scored an average connection speed of 16.7 Mbps in Q3 2011.

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