Martin Fowler

British programmer · United Kingdom · On the map · Developers · Born 1963 · age 62

Martin Fowler is a British software developer, author and international public speaker on software development, specialising in object-oriented analysis and design, UML, patterns, and agile software development methodologies, including extreme programming.

Martin Fowler is read about 157 times a day, in 23 languages.

A typical day, 30 days to 9 November 2026

The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 108 days, one point a day.

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A life in dates

2012“Often designers do complicated things that improve the capacity on a particular hardware platform when it might actually be cheaper to buy more hardware.”In their wordsMartin Fowler (2012) Patterns of Enterprise Application ArchitectureRead the whole statement

2005“Refactoring is a disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior.”In their wordsMartin Fowler at refactoring.com as cited in: Lawrence Bernstein, C. M. Yuhas (2005) Trustworthy Systems Through Quantitative SoftwareRead the whole statement

2004“Steve Mellor and I independently came up with a characterization of the three modes in which people use the UML: sketch, blueprint, and programming language.”In their wordsp. 2Read the whole statement

“Graphical design notations have been with us for a while... their primary value is in communication and understanding.”In their wordsp. xxviRead the whole statement

2002“People also underestimate the time they spend debugging. They underestimate how much time they can spend chasing a long bug. With testing, I know straight away when I added a bug.”In their words18 November 2002Martin Fowler (2002) as cited in Evolutionary Design: A Conversation with Martin Fowler, Part III by Bill VennersRead the whole statement

1999“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”In their wordsp. 15Read the whole statement

1963Born18 December 1963

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Martin Fowler

4 statements, newest first

One of the things I've been trying to do is look for simpler or rules underpinning good or bad design. I think one of the most valuable rules is to avoid duplication.
2007 · Martin Fowler as cited in: James Shore, Shane Warden (2007) The Art of Agile Development. p. 319, Own words
Comprehensiveness is the enemy of comprehensibility
2004 · p. 32, Own words
Transparency is valuable, but while many things can be made transparent in distributed objects, performance isn't usually one of them.
2003 · Fowler (2003) in: Software development. Vol. 11. p. 99, Own words