…find out what they’re excited about. That’s kind of a basic threshold for me. And it doesn’t matter whether it has anything to do with programming or computers. If they can’t get enthusiastic about something, they’re not going to get charged up in a group.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

The history of Earth up until now has been a history of optimizers spinning their wheels at a constant rate, generating a constant optimization pressure. And creating optimized products, not at a constant rate, but at an accelerating rate, because of how object-level innovations open up the pathway to other object-level innovations. But that acceleration is taking place with a protected meta level doing the actual optimizing.

— Robin Hanson, Eliezer Yudkowsky, The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate

Schrödinger was the first of the quantum theoreticians to express sympathy with the Upanishads and eastern philosophical thought. A growing body of literature now embodies this perspective, including two popular works, The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra and the Dancing Wu Li masters by Gary Zukav.

— Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I

What I have learned, working here, is that smart, successful people are cursed. The curse is confidence. It’s confidence that comes from a lifetime of success after real success, an objectively great job, working at an objectively great company, making a measurably great salary, building products that get millions of users. You must be smart. In fact, you are smart. You can prove it.

— Avery Pennarun, The Curse of Smart People

If you can’t build a monolith, what makes you think microservices are the answer?

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