Dealing with complexity is the most important challenge in software design.

— JohnOusterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design

There’s this Pollyannaish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is stay positive and get along, to not hurt anyone’s feelings. Well, that’s just wrong. Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive. True creativity requires some trade-offs.

— Jonah Lehrer, Group Think: The Brainstorming Myth

An evolutionary architecture consists of three primary aspects: incremental change, fitness functions, and appropriate coupling.

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

Bits that are embodied as structure (varying in space, invariant across time) we perceive as memory, and bits that are embodied as sequence (varying in time, invariant across space) we perceive as code. Gates are the intersections where bits span both worlds at the moments of transition from one instant to the next.

— George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral

…self-organization is such a basic property of living systems that even the most overbearing power structure can never fully kill it, although in the name of law and order, self-organization can be suppressed for long, barren, cruel, boring periods.

— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems