There are many technical workers who enjoy wandering so much that, like Alice in Wonderland, they don’t much care where they go, so long as they get somewhere.

— Gerald Weinberg, Becoming a Technical Leader

…leading without authority is more difficult than leading with authority. It requires a level of self-awareness that few of us are ready to develop.

— Clay Scroggins, How to Lead When You’re Not in Charge

Consistency is a powerful tool for reducing the complexity of a system and making its behavior more obvious.

— John Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design

How problematic to have both a body and a mind, for the former stands in almost monstrous contrast to the latter’s dignity and intelligence.

— Alain De Botton, The Consolation of Philosophy

…when discussing scalable data systems, people make comments along the lines of, “You’re not Google or Amazon. Stop worrying about scale and just use a relational database.” There is truth in that statement: building for scale that you don’t need is wasted effort and may lock you into an inflexible design.

— Martin Kleppmann, Designing Data-Intensive Applications