Correlation is not causation, but if you combine the fact that much of Islamic doctrine is antihumanistic with the fact that many Muslims believe that Islamic doctrine is inerrant—and throw in the fact that the Muslims who carry out illiberal policies and violent acts say they are doing it because they are following those doctrines—then it becomes a stretch to say that the inhumane practices have nothing to do with religious devotion and that the real cause is oil, colonialism, Islamophobia, Orientalism, or Zionism.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

There seems to be an idealistic form of geek thinking that holds that if only we made decisions better, we would never make mistakes. I was a young adherent, a worshipper at the altar of “If Only I Were Infinitely Smart.” Fortunately, I got over it. I learned the value of reversibility (long before I had a name for it) and realized the value of making decisions reversible.

— Kent Beck, Tidy First?

The way you spend your day reflects your priorities, whether you like to think of them that way or not.

— Brennen Reece, Productivity for the Depressive Polymath

Before your system can be scaled with practical approaches, like load balancers, mesh networks, queues, and other trappings of distributive computing, the simple systems have to be stable and performant. Disaster comes from trying to build complex systems right away and neglecting the foundation with which all system behavior—planned and unexpected—will be determined.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

If you want to win in a software business, just take on the hardest problem you can find, use the most powerful language you can get, and wait for your competitors’ pointy-haired bosses to revert to the mean.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters