We programmers are weird creatures. We love writing code. But when it comes to reading it we usually shy away. After all, writing code is so much more fun, and reading code is hard — sometimes almost impossible.

— Kevlin Henney, 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

People whose survival depends on qualitative “job assessments” by someone of higher rank in an organization cannot be trusted for critical decisions.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

You must not design by committee.

— Max Kanat-Alexander, Code Simplicity

If two programs respond in the same way to every possible action by the user, then they render the same environment; if they would respond perceptibly differently to even one possible action, they render different environments.

— David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality

There’s a brilliant quote by Tony Hoare in his Turing Award speech about how there are two ways to design a system: “One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.”

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work