…one study of large internet services found that configuration errors by operators were the leading cause of outages, whereas hardware faults (servers or network) played a role in only 10–25% of…

— Martin Kleppmann, Designing Data-Intensive Applications

…as a source of organic order, a master plan is both too precise, and not precise enough. The totality is too precise: the details are not precise enough.

— Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design

“I dropped out of graduate school because postmodernism was then coming into academia,” Craig explained to me, “and it didn’t seem worthwhile to go through all of the hard work of science and present all the evidence, just to have it dismissed by [someone] saying, ‘Well, that’s just your narrative.’”

— Alice Dreger, Galileo’s Middle Finger

…for the best programming at the least cost, give the best possible programmers you can find sufficient time so you need the smallest number of them.

— Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming

When a process expert can tell me how to work, but doesn’t share in that work or its consequences, authority and responsibility are misaligned.

— Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres, Extreme Programming Explained