Why is composing symphonies tough? I don't know. It's just very few people in the world can do it well. And I think that's the case with upfront design. It is very hard to do well.

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.

If you're a technical lead, you need to be coding.

If you're afraid to change something it is clearly poorly designed.

Now I'm a pretty lazy person and am prepared to work quite hard in order to avoid work.

Never in the annals of software engineering was so much owed by so many to so few lines of code

Comprehensiveness is the enemy of comprehensibility.

When to use iterative development? You should use iterative development only on projects that you want to succeed.

I find that writing unit tests actually increases my programming speed

One of the big dangers is to pretend that you can follow a predictable process when you can't.

The biggest issue on software teams is making sure everyone understands what everyone else is doing.

Where ambition can cover its enterprises, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions

Systems are complex, so controlling an attack and achieving a desired level of damage may be harder than using physical weapons.

The first step in having any successful war is getting people to fight it.

They were angry, I thought. Horrified. These teenagers, with their hormones, making out beneath a video broadcasting the shattered voice of a former father.

People tell me all the time that my songs help them express things to loved ones that they may not be able to say themselves.

The task of asking nonliving matter to speak and the responsibility for interpreting its reply is that of physics.

One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

We write frankly and freely, but then we modify before we print.

Reading is like breathing in, writing is like breathing out.

I'm going to build a reactor, that's for sure.