This is a collection of some of my favorite quotes on a variety of subjects.

Programming

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.

— Alan Perlis

Make it work, make it right, make it fast.

— Kent Beck

For all the silly platitudes thrown around in our field, the exaltation of refactoring isn't one of them — aggressive and continuous refinement is the only path to beautiful, sustainable software.

Any code that ossifies after being first written is almost certainly bad code.

— Brandur Leach

for each desired change, make the change easy (warning: this may be hard), then make the easy change

— Kent Beck

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.

— Edsger Dijkstra

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.

— Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month

When people say "comments are bad" they mean "don't put information in comments if you can make it evident from the code". This is correct.

When they say "comments are good" they mean "take the higher-level thoughts you couldn't, and write those down too". This is also correct.

— Gábor Lehel

Seven deadly sins [of programming]:

1. Code even you cannot understand a week after you wrote it – no comments
2. Code with no specifications
3. Code that is shipped as soon as it runs and before it is beautiful
4. Code with added features
5. Code that is very very fast very very very obscure and incorrect
6. Code that is not beautiful
7. Code that you wrote without understanding the problem

— Joe Armstrong, "The Mess We're In"

There are certainly times when code needs to be complex, but this does not mean that it should be complicated. And when code needs to be simple, it should not be simplistic. Although well meant, some programmers assume that for their code to be readable and be considered good they must spell out its logic and flow on droolproof paper with the equivalent of kindergarten vocabulary. The resulting code is often dumbed down and padded out to the point of incomprehensibility, achieving quite the opposite result from the one intended.

— Kevlin Henney, "Code versus Software"

Dogma

What does it mean to be a revolutionary? To challenge an existing dogma, instead of complying with it: to reject its tenets, highlight its flaws and improve each of its shortcomings.

— Umair Haque

If you fetishize and cargo cult the infrastructure required by companies with literally 10,000 times your traffic, you will not have fun.

— Gary Bernhardt

Software

There's an oft-cited trope in technology circles that products are only about execution – that your choice of database or programming language doesn't matter. Having seen reams of evidence to the contrary first hand, count me as a firm disbeliever. Instead of working with strong constraints, ACID, and rich data types, I’ve spent the last few years building expertise on how to not break things in a schemaless world, how to build applications without transactions (or put otherwise, how to mitigate collateral damage), and how to repair non-relational models that should just have been relational in the first place.

— Brandur Leach

Software Architecture

A Big Ball of Mud is a haphazardly structured, sprawling, sloppy, duct-tape-and-baling-wire, spaghetti-code jungle. These systems show unmistakable signs of unregulated growth, and repeated, expedient repair. Information is shared promiscuously among distant elements of the system, often to the point where nearly all the important information becomes global or duplicated.

The overall structure of the system may never have been well defined.

If it was, it may have eroded beyond recognition. Programmers with a shred of architectural sensibility shun these quagmires. Only those who are unconcerned about architecture, and, perhaps, are comfortable with the inertia of the day-to-day chore of patching the holes in these failing dikes, are content to work on such systems.

— Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder, Big Ball of Mud

Perfectionism

If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.

— David Foster Wallace

People

We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

Now people are books to me. I read them from cover to cover and toss them aside. I devour them, one after the other. And the more I read, the more insatiable I become. There is no limit to it.

— Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

Solitude

I enjoy controlled loneliness. I like wandering around the city alone. I’m not afraid of coming back to an empty flat and lying down in an empty bed. I’m afraid of having no one to miss, of having no one to love.

— Kuba Wojewódzki

America

What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.

— Andy Warhol

Values

Why was I so dissatisfied with my (paid, professional) work? Because it was misaligned with my values and sense of what needed to be put into the world. Why did I get disillusioned with my circus show? Many reasons, but the biggest, starkest one is that it felt like I wasn’t saying anything I wanted to say – it felt empty and meaningless.

This wasn’t about utility or 'impact'. It was about me, and my sense of self, and how that tied in to what I wanted to make in the world.

— Autotranslucence, "Art as the Starting Point"

Loss

I think it's important to realize you can miss something, but not want it back.

— Paulo Coelho

Change

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

— Heraclitus

Time

How can eleven years ago still feel like yesterday, when I usually can't remember what I did last week? Getting older isn't the sensation of the past receding. It's the opposite, an increasingly long stretch of time that still feels like "now".

— Bob Nystrom, "Nostalgia Rathole"

Incompetence

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

— Grey's law

The Web

You’ll never live in a utopia, but you can glance into one. Economies are based on scarcity, the amount of things you own, and the amount of things you can take from others.

However digital space has no scarcity, it’s impossible to make a digital asset scarce. On the web everything is free and unlimited, but also independent and individual. On the web we all own infinite worlds, we are all kings and queens. It's an economy of creativity, the only limits are time and imagination.

All these social media and crypto people, they try to take that away from you because the only way they can make money is to put limits on infinity, they squash you into their format like a sardine in a can.

— Melon

Incidents

Incidents that you can control often feel better than third party incidents where you can’t control the outcome. After the incident you can write a post-mortem, learn from it, and get a warm fuzzy feeling that you’ve improved your product along the way.

However, in the cold light of day, the numbers are unlikely to support this theory. Unless you have the best SRE team in the world, you aren’t going to ship infrastructure products with better availability than a cloud provider.

Instead, we should again focus on the things that are within our control.

— Lisa Karlin Curtis, incident.io

Indecision

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Limits

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.

— Sylvia Plath

Uncategorized

But one of these days it'll come right back
I'll get over myself and I'll tell myself that
I don't have to wait to be happy when I'm old
And that one of these days I'll find a way
To fight the waves, embrace the pain
And paint the ages a hundred shades of gold
And of gold
And of gold
And of gold

— Ethel Cain, "Golden Age"

Perhaps the only difference between me and other people was that I've always demanded more from the sunset; more spectacular colors when the sun hit the horizon. That's perhaps my only sin.

— Nymphomaniac: Vol. I

You can hear it can't you? That little voice. The one that says, "Don't stare too long. Don't touch. Don't do anything you might regret." I used to be the same. Whenever I wanted something, I could hear that voice telling me to stop. To be careful. To leave most of my life un-lived. You know the only place that voice left me alone? In my dreams. I was free. I could be as good, or as bad, as I felt like being. And if I wanted something, I could just reach out and take it. But then I would wake up, and the voice would start all over again. So I ran away, crossed the shining sea. And when I finally set foot back on solid ground, the first thing I heard was that goddamn voice. Do you know what it said? It said, "This is the new world, and in this world, you can be whoever the fuck you want."

— Maeve Millay, Westworld, 01x02 "Chestnut"

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

People feeling alone in their interests has always been true to a certain extent, but the internet has made it much worse. The excess of information allows you to travel down your path of interest with mad velocity. On the internet, Wonderland is recursive, with rabbit holes opening up to yet more rabbit holes; you never stop falling. And the further you fall, the less likely it is that anyone you’ve ever met is falling where you are. This will make you immensely sad. You will visit your parents, and when they ask you about your life you will have two choices. You can either be incomprehensible and see them grow concerned about things you are excited about, or you can talk about surface-level things and cry a little when you are alone at night.

— Henrik Karlsson, "A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox"

Excuse me but isn't all this discourse about small games getting rather macho, all that DOING and TERSENESS and deed-focused unimaginativeness and "simply create". I'd rather not!! Doing anything is usually a poor decision! Stay in bed! If you absolutely have to make something for whatever unresolved psychic pressures I'd rather it be long, long, dreamy, long, unfinished, unfinishable, long, long, just a daydream, keep all the art assets inside the game itself so you can walk around on them, keep your notes as blocks inside the game, wander as a little guy through the temple of your own poor decisions, watch them spread out, into landscapes and fields, build an apartment for your guy in the middle of the clutter, keep adding to the clutter, long, long, long... then you die, and nobody finds out about it, or ever has to play it. There are already plenty of games around anyway.

— Large Game Manifesto

I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.

— Georgia O'Keeffe

I was by myself for a pretty long time. I needed to do that. I think everyone that I know has wanted to do that or needed to do that at some point. I think when you spend enough time when it’s quiet around you and you don’t open your mouth for three or four days, there’s parts of your brain that can kind of rest. I think when we’re out in the world and we have to talk to people, we edit ourselves. You know, we have to like, act a little bit. As honest as we may be as humans, when we’re out here, we’re all kind of wearing mirrors on our faces. You know, constantly reacting to how to react to the people around you. And I think when you’re alone for a long enough time, you can feel a lot more peace.

— Justin Vernon

You still have a lot of time to make yourself be what you want.

— S. E. Hinton, The Outsiders

Beyond a given point man is not helped by more "knowing", but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.

— Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

I'm fighting myself. I know I am. One minute I want to remember. The next minute I want to live in the land of forgetting. One minute I want to feel. The next minute I never want to feel ever again.

— Benjamin Alire Sáenz

the most damaging thing that school, homework, and the 9-5 does to the human soul is making you feel like there's an amount of work you can do after which you'll be "done"

— @DefenderOfBasic

It is very hard to give any general advice about writing.

Here's my attempt.

1. Turn off the Radio.
2. Read all the good books you can, and avoid nearly all magazines.
3. Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You shd. hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again.
4. Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about...)
5. Take great pains to be clear. Remember that though you start by knowing what you mean, the reader doesn't, and a single ill-chosen word may lead him to a total misunderstanding. In a story it is terribly easy just to forget that you have not told the reader something that he wants to know—the whole picture is so clear in your own mind that you forget that it isn't the same in his.
6. When you give up a bit of work don't (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the rewriting of things begun and abandoned years earlier.
7. Don't use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm, which still needs years of training
8. Be sure you know the meaning (or meanings) of every word you use.

— C. S. Lewis

Now let me give you the benefit of my experience in facing 400 pages of blank stock—the appalling stuff that must be filled. I know that no one really wants the benefit of anyone's experience which is probably why it is so freely offered. But the following are some of the things I have had to do to keep from going nuts.

1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theatre, it doesn't exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn't belong there.
5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

— John Steinbeck

Does anyone here run a website for sadomasochists? Okay, there are no hands up in the room which means that nobody should have "Submit" as the text on their email button.

— Patrick McKenzie, "How to Engineer Marketing Success"

But in the particular case of Looking for Alaska, I think there's an extra irony to the book being so widely banned, which is that it is almost universally challenged in the name of Christianity. And that idea of radical hope that's at the center of the book is a Christian idea that I wrote about because of my own Christian faith.

This just goes to show that there is no way to appease book banners, because even if you agree with their professed value system, any attempt to portray the world as it actually exists will inevitably lead to censorship. Ultimately, what these folks are opposed to is not books, it's reality. It's not books they find obscene, it's reality they find obscene.

— John Green, "About THAT Scene in Looking for Alaska

Use the existing tools wherever possible. If the tools do not exist you are spiritually obliged to create them.

— Lorde