Other than when you are very close to a deadline, however, you should not put off refactoring because you haven’t got time. Experience with several projects has shown that a bout of refactoring results in increased productivity. Not having enough time usually is a sign that you need to do some refactoring.

— Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, John Brant, William Opdyke, Don Roberts, and Erich Gamma, Refactoring

Architects aren’t immune to the “meta-work is more interesting than work” syndrome, which manifests in choosing inappropriate but buzz-worthy architectural styles like microservices.

— Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons, and Patrick Kua, Building Evolutionary Architectures

Genius is not so much a light as it is a constant awareness of the surrounding gloom, and its typical cowardice is to bathe in its own glow and avoid, as much as possible, looking out beyond its boundary.

— Stanislaw Lem, Seth Shostak, and Michael Kandel, His Master’s Voice

There’s no answer that works forever in all situations. There is only the best answer for the moment, and it almost certainly involves making trade-offs in one direction or another.

— Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum Wright, Software Engineering at Google

Anyone could have used these 4,178 words. In the hands of William Shakespeare, they became King Lear.

— Gerald M. Weinberg, Fiona Charles, Keats Kirsch, Dani Weinberg, and Earl Everett, Weinberg on Writing