The problem is that coding isn’t fun if all you can do is call things out of a library, if you can’t write the library yourself. If the job of coding is just to be finding the right combination of parameters, that does fairly obvious things, then who’d want to go into that as a career?

— Peter Seibe, lCoders at Work

Most governments, most of the time, seek to monopolize violence. If only the government can legitimately use force, and this use is constrained by law, then the forms of politics that we take for granted become possible.

— Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

We all know a lot of very “book smart” people who can tell you all the facts and figures. But when it comes time to get their hands dirty, they’re more talk than anything. That’s because to actually apply something takes an even higher level of knowledge.

— Jonathan A. Levi, The Only Skill That Matters

Good operations can often work around the limitations of bad (or incomplete) software, but good software cannot run reliably with bad operations.

— Martin Kleppmann, Designing Data-Intensive Applications

Many people interpret this as “agile developers don’t do documentation,” which is wrong. Agile developers do create documentation, but they use a pragmatic filter to make sure the investment in creating any documentation is really worth the effort.

— Andy Hunt, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning