Collecting quotes

Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence boils down to curiosity. – Aaron Swartz

Before we start to write any piece of code, we should understand what that code is supposed to do. Understanding requires thinking, and thinking is hard. - Leslie Lamport

Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is. - Dick Guindon

What programming continuously teaches me is that asking the right questions is infinitely more important than writing the code. – Daniel Miessler

Make it work, then make it beautiful, then if you really, really have to, make it fast. 90 percent of the time, if you make it beautiful, it will already be fast. So really, just make it beautiful! - Joe Armstrong

Or put another way, the way to figure out the separation is by doing as much as you can without mutation, and then encapsulating the mutation separately. - Gary Bernhardt

A complex system that works has evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system built from scratch won’t work. - John Gall (Gall's Law)

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? - Brian Kernighan (Kernighan's Law)

Oh really? There’s debate about open-source hardware? I’m going to keep shipping open-source hardware while you all argue about it. – Limor Fried

The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer. - Ward Cunningham (Cunningham's Law)

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure. - Melvin Conway

You haven’t mastered a tool until you understand when it should not be used. - Kelsey Hightower

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. - Charles Goodhart (Goodhart's Law)

We must struggle to develop a suspicious nature as well as a lively imagination. - Herbert Leeds and Gerald M. Weinberg

Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, "We've always done it this way." I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise. - Rear Admiral Grace Hopper

Adding [human resources] to a late software project makes it later. - Fred Brooks

People are part of the system. The design should match the user's experience, expectations, and mental models. - Principle of Least Astonishment