Here I collect quotes, roughly grouped by theme. Feel free to contact me if you spot a mistake in attribution.
A rich man is not he who has a lot, but he who needs little.
— Unknown, possibly Socrates or EpictetusThe grass is greenest where you water it.
— Robert Fulghum in It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on ItFor every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.
— H. L. MenckenProblems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back.
— Piet HeinThe essential prerequisite for finding the answer to a question is the desire to find it.
— Tristan Needham in Visual Complex AnalysisClear thought doesn’t respect the boundaries between disciplines, or between theory and practice.
— Scott AaronsonYour success or failure in business as in life is directly tied to what you produce — not what you promise or represent. There is no shortcut to knowledge, success or mastery.
— Brian KrebsImproving daily work is even more important than doing daily work. If you’re not improving you’re likely getting worse.
— Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford in The Phoenix ProjectListen closely to people when they talk about others. They are telling you about themselves.
— UnknownHard work is a talent.
— Garry Kasparov in Deep ThinkingShow me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
— Charly MungerProductivity is meaningless unless you know what your goal is.
— Eliyahu M. Goldratt in The Goal.Since I was seven years old or so, I’ve been obsessed by the realization that there are no guardrails that prevent human beings from choosing the worst, that all the adults who soothingly reassure you that “everything always works out okay in the end” are full of it.
— Scott Aaronson in What is there to say?The first step to knowledge is a confession of ignorance.
— Gerald Weinberg in Becoming a Technical LeaderIQ scores would be a lot more meaningful if you added 10,000 to each score.
— Gerald Weinberg in Quality Software ManagementIntelligence is not a scalar quantity, it is a vector quantity.
— Joshua Bloch in Coders at WorkThe thought that disaster is impossible often leads to an unthinkable disaster.
— Gerald Weinberg in Quality Software ManagementEach solution is the source of the next problem.
— Gerald Weinberg in Are your lights on?Criticize only ideas, never people.
— Gerald Weinberg in Becoming a Technical LeaderTo do a job effectively, one must set priorities. Too many people let their “in” basket set the priorities. On any given day, unimportant but interesting trivia pass through an office; one must not permit these to monopolize his time. The human tendency is to while away time with unimportant matters that do not require mental effort or energy. Since they can be easily resolved, they give a false sense of accomplishment. The manager must exert self-discipline to ensure that his energy is focused where it is truly needed.
— Adm. Hyman G. Rickover in Doing a JobThe worst theory of management is to not have one at all, the second worst is one that doesn’t change.
— Will Larson in An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering ManagementThe master doesn't talk, he acts. When his work is done, the people say 'Amazing: we did it, all by ourselves.'
— Lao-tzu in Tao Te Ching, 17, Stephen Mitchell translationTime is a great teacher. Unfortunately it kills all its students.
— Hector BerliozClarke’s Law: Any sufficiently crappy research is indistinguishable from fraud.
— Andrew GelmanAll problems in computer science can be solved by another layer of indirection.
— David WheelerA little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
— VariousThe inability to see ourselves as others see us is the number one obstacle to self improvement.
— Gerald Weinberg in Becoming a Technical LeaderWisdom is the ability to take your own advice.
— Sam Harris in Waking UpA month in the laboratory can often save an hour in the library.
— Frank WestheimerSome single mind must master, else there will be no agreement in anything.
— Abraham LincolnIf all you read is the very best humanity has to offer, you still won't live long enough to read more than a fraction of it. So why waste your time on anything else?
— "hackuser"It doesn’t matter how smart you are: if you work on the wrong project you won’t get anywhere.
— Andrew Gelman in Genius is not enoughBayesian inference isn’t magic, just logic.
— Richard McElreath in Statistical RethinkingA good solution isn’t an accretion of code, it’s a distillation of it.
— Robert Nystrom in Game Programming PatternsLike poets, game designers often simplify their work as they age, the better to capture the real essence of what they’re trying to express.
— Jimmy Maher in X-COMThe first tenet of optimization is that nothing is faster than not having to perform a task in the first place.
— Christer Ericson in Real Time Collision DetectionThe physics of software is not algorithms, data structures, languages and abstractions. These are just tools we make, use, throw away. The real physics of software is the physics of people–specifically, our limitations when it comes to complexity, and our desire to work together to solve large problems in pieces.
— Pieter Hintjens in ZeroMQ GuideOnce your software hits a certain size, complexity will dominate your ability to understand it and work with it. I do not care what processes you are using. I do not care how well you test, or anything else. Complexity, that elephant, is going to dominate what you can do.
— Rich Hickey in Simplicity MattersThe biggest problem in the development and maintenance of large-scale software systems is complexity — large systems are hard to understand.
— B Moseley, P Marks in Out of the Tar PitSo very much of the complexity and abstraction we build into software is gratuitous and unnecessary. The real art of writing software is writing simple, obvious code that also happens to be fast and efficient.
— "Taneq"Gall's Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
— John GallSoftware engineering is programming integrated over time. All of the hard parts of engineering come from dealing with time: compatibility over time, dealing with changes to underlying infrastructure and dependencies, and working with legacy code or data. Fundamentally, it is a different task to produce a programming solution to a problem (that solves the current instance of the problem) vs. an engineering solution (that solves current instances, future instances that we can predict, and - through flexibility - allows updates to solve future instances we may not be able to predict).
— Titus Winters in Non-Atomic Refactoring and Software SustainabilityAs usual in software, the initial costs are more apparent and the long term benefits seem abstract and difficult to measure—which means the latter are often entirely ignored.
— Douglas W. Hubbard in How to Measure AnythingQuite likely the loss of maintainability is the ultimate cause of death for even the best designed, built and maintained systems.
— Gerald Weinberg in Quality Software ManagementI’m fond to repeating the 90/90 rule that “it takes 90% of the effort to get 90% of the way there, then it takes the other 90% to do the last 10%” and someone quipped back, it can also be 90/90/90. The point being is that you can have something that look pretty good and impresses people, but solving the niggling problems, making it manufacturable and cost effective almost always takes more time, effort, and money than people want to think. These problems tend to become multiplicative if you take on too many challenges at the same time.
— Karl Guttag in Magic Leap - Separating Magic and RealityThe bigger the promise, the bigger the response. It does not have to be logical or sane. Indeed, insane propositions are often more attractive than sane ones. A sane proposition requires hard work and patience. An insane one just needs suspension of disbelief.
— UnknownPeople who are trying to run a business or build a computer for a long term objective know that the short term limitations block them from the long term success. So if you look at leaders of companies that had really good long term success, every time they saw that they had to redo something, they did.
— Jim Keller in Moore's Law, Microprocessors, and First Principles, Lex Fridman Podcast #70Humans are successful because culture breaks the genomic bottleneck.
— Anthony M Zador in The Genomic Bottleneck: A Lesson from BiologyYou can’t be more accurate than the noise.
— UnknownIf you make tools, make tools you’re going to use yourself.
— Richard Chuang in The Past, present and future of computer graphicsBefore starting a project, decide conditions under which you’ll quit.
— David Epstein in Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized WorldA healthy group spends little time on decision making. Its members have high independence. They tend to do first, talk second. There is little or no argument. An infected group struggles to get consensus. Its members argue over irrelevant details. Even the smallest project takes huge planning, and stresses everyone.
— Pieter Hintjens in The Psychopath CodeA hierarchy is a system that formalizes unequal access to limited resources.
— Robert Sapolsky in BehaveEconomics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses.
— Tomas Sowell in Basic EconomicsMaybe this composability that we love so much is not a property of nature. Maybe this is just the property of our brains, maybe our brains are such that we have to see structure everywhere and if we can't find the structure we just give up. So in this way category theory is not really about mathematics or physics. Category theory is about our minds, how our brains work.
— Bartosz Milewski in Category Theory 1.1: Motivation and Philosophy