Craftsmanship over Crap. — Uncle Bob
Drew Magary: “I do what I fucking want, which should be the first and last stupid retarded ‘man law’ ever.”
Step by step walk the thousand-mile road. Study strategy over the years and achieve the spirit of the warrior. Today is victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men. — Miyamoto Musashi, The Book Of Five Rings Read more →
An elevated spirit is weak and a low spirit is weak. Do not let the enemy see your spirit. — Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
He in his madness prays for storms
And dreams that storms will bring him peace.
The job of our time is to hospice the death of the old unsustainable systems and structures, and to midwife the birth of new sustainable systems and new ways of being. — Lynne Twist Read more →
One can come at improvement from two angles: How can we make things suck less? or What is the ideal state that we should shoot for? I’m for the second option. It is the classic Lean approach to improvement, BTW: Start by visualizing perfection. — Mary Poppendieck Read more →
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. — Steve Jobs Read more →
[Innovation] comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important. — Steve Jobs Read more →
Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
It’s enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. — Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano Read more →
He thought: I didn’t say the right words. Why do I never find the right words? The man needed help and I recited a formula. God forgive me. Will someone only give me a formula too when I come to die? — Graham Greene, Monsignor Quixote
He prayed in his silence: O God, make me human, let me feel temptation. Save me from my indifference. — Graham Greene, Monsignor Quixote
. . . you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. — Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable
Sit down and be quiet. You are drunk and this is the edge of the roof. — Rumi
If you don’t like something change it; if you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. — Mary Engelbreit
L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace!
If there is one message I would like to communicate, whatever your job title and however your work is touched by software development, it is this: software development is capable of much, much more than it is currently delivering. — Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained Read more →
Software development has been steered wrong by the word “requirement,” defined in the dictionary as “something mandatory or obligatory.” The word carries a connotation of absolutism and permanence, inhibitors to embracing change. And the word “requirement” is just plain wrong. Out of one thousand pages of “requirements,” if you deploy a system with the right 20% or 10% or even 5%, you will likely realize all of the business benefit envisioned for the whole system. So what were the other 80%? Not “requirements”; they weren’t really mandatory or obligatory. — Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained Read more →
I ask people to think about the question, “What is the simplest thing that could possibly work?” I’m not asking you to think about what is too simple to work, just to bias your thinking toward eliminating wasted complexity. — Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained Read more →
