incremental development can be disconcerting for teams and management who aren’t used to it because it front-loads the stress in a project.

— Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce, Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests

Hacking is the philosophy of exploration, personal expression, pushing boundaries, and breaking the rules. It stands against hierarchy and bureaucracy. It celebrates the individual. Hacking baits you with fun, learning, and glory. Hacking is the promise that with a computer and access to the internet, you have the agency to change the world.

— Daniel Holden, Build Your Own Lisp

It’s probably most important to realize this: when other people react differently than you would in a given situation, they aren’t crazy, lazy, or just plain difficult. And neither are you.

— Andy Hunt, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

The good craftsmen seemed to have the same fault as the poets: each of them, because of his success at his craft, thought himself very wise in other most important pursuits, and this error of theirs overshadows the wisdom they had.

— Plato, The Apology

Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product’ as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.

— Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning…Was the Command Line