…the qualities of a good Staff Engineer transcend what stack you’re working in. Ultimately, staff engineers need to be able to think about engineering decisions as a series of tradeoffs, and articulating those tradeoffs is a skill that you can have from any perspective within the stack.

— Will Larson and Tanya Reilly, Staff Engineer

When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy.

— James Clear, Atomic Habits

It’s true that people don’t care much about glitz. In one study after another, workers failed to give much weight to decor in choosing, for instance, among variously colored panels and fixtures. The feeling seemed to be that depressing surroundings would be counterproductive, but as long as the office wasn’t depressing, then you could happily ignore it and get down to work. If all we’re shooting for is an ignorable workplace, then money spent on high-fashion decor is a waste.

— Tom DeMarco, Tim Lister, Peopleware

If you are the kind of person who values certainty over flexibility, you’ll likely use a lot of spies in your tests and you’ll tolerate the inevitable fragility. If, however, you are the kind of person who values flexibility over certainty, you’ll be more like me. You’ll prefer value and property tests over spies, and you’ll tolerate the nagging uncertainty.

— Robert C. Martin, Clean Craftsmanship

Precisely because we are of a broad, Karamazovian nature—and this is what I am driving at—capable of containing all possible opposites and of contemplating both abysses at once, the abyss above us, an abyss of lofty ideals, and the abyss beneath us, an abyss of the lowest and foulest degradation.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Brothers Karamazov