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

Bureaucracy was invented to maximize control, coordination, and consistency—things that are essential to reliability and efficiency but aren’t the hallmarks of online communities and open innovation projects.

— Jim Whitehurst and Gary Hamel, The Open Organization

Developers understand the benefits of everything and the tradeoffs of nothing!

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

The greatest risk with design patterns is over-application. Not every problem can be solved cleanly with an existing design pattern; don’t try to force a problem into a design pattern when a custom approach will be cleaner.

— John Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design

…proximity to hardware gives software a bad rap, like an extremely attractive friend who makes you feel inadequate: “The anomaly is not that software progress is so slow but that computer hardware progress is so fast. No other technology since civilization began has seen six orders of magnitude price-performance gain in 30 years”.

— Adam Barr, The Problem With Software