here is, unfortunately, a belief (typically among those who have never built production-quality software) that constructing and maintaining software solutions is easy. Often this belief emerges from those who have never seen the software solution to a problem of any magnitude, either because they have dealt only with toy problems (this is a problem for many academics and their students)

— Robert L. Glass, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

It’s great to be proficient at a lot of things. But it’s also great—and arguably more human—to know your limitations

— Peter Hollins, Mental Models

R. A. Bjork’s concept of desirable difficulty. More difficult retrieval leads to better learning, provided the act of retrieval is itself successful.

— Scott Young, Unlearning

The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or “incentives” for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

An engineer’s skills are like the blade of a knife: you may spend tens of thousands of dollars to find engineers with the sharpest skills for your team, but if you “use” that knife for years without sharpening it, you will wind up with a dull knife that is inefficient, and in some cases useless.

— Brian W. Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman, Team Geek