• A good engineer never assumes the perfect reliability of the components of the system. He or she builds in redundancy to protect the integrity of the total system.
• That which hinders your task is your task.
• Software has been riding on immense hardware improvement, so it looks like it’s doing okay.
• Software engineering is what happens to programming when you add time and other programmers.
• Engineering is figuring out how to do what you want with what you’ve actually got
• You can’t guilt yourself into doing things you want to accomplish. You’ll always resist and make excuses. The only way is to enjoy the act of doing them.
• C programmer’s motto: “Build upon the work of others”
• ​10x programeriai vs 1x programerius​
• "Premature optimization is the root of all evil". This can result in a design that is not as clean as it could have been or code that is incorrect, because the code is complicated by the optimization and the programmer is distracted by optimizing. This applies more broadly than just for code. Abstraction is a form of optimization and shouldn't be done before the space has been properly explored to know what abstractions should be built.
• Integrity compounds infinitely, and capability always decays.
• Typically, the more expensive the product the longer the sales page needs to be.
• Technical debt is the debt we pay for our (bad) decisions, and it’s paid back in time and frustration.
• When every developer is urged to build something with "measurable impact", you end up like Google, where people launch something visible, get promoted, and move on, leaving the service to wither away.

  I've found the most incredible thing is just to say "no" to things. Not doing things has this fantastic side effect of not causing more work. When you don't do more things, you don't cause more problems, which doesn't need more work, which doesn't need more staff, which doesn't require more money, which gives you less stress, and gives you happier staff, happier customers, and a happier self.
• The greatest of all weaknesses is the fear of appearing weak.
• ​

• You save time, because you avoid writing code that you turn out not to need.
• Your code is better, because you avoid polluting it with 'guesses' that turn out to be more or less wrong but stick around anyway.
• ​http://c2.com/xp/YouArentGonnaNeedIt.html​

• If you show a nonprogrammer a screen which has a user interface that is 90% worse, they will think that the program is 90% worse.
• If you show a nonprogrammer a screen which has a user interface which is 100% beautiful, they will think the program is almost done.

First, there is often an unrealistic expectation that an experienced engineer knows every technology in their field. Have you seen a “learning roadmap” that consists of a hundred libraries and tools? It’s useful — but intimidating.

What’s more, no matter how experienced you get, you may still find yourself switching between feeling capable, inadequate (“Impostor syndrome”), and overconfident (“Dunning–Kruger effect”).

We can admit our knowledge gaps, may or may not feel like impostors, and still have deeply valuable expertise that takes years of hard work to develop.

I’m aware of my knowledge gaps (at least, some of them). I can fill them in later if I become curious or if I need them for a project. This doesn’t devalue my knowledge and experience. There’s plenty of things that I can do well. For example, learning technologies when I need them.

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”