Extracting patterns from today's programming practices ennobles them in a way they don't deserve

~ Alan Kay

The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

~ Alan Kay

Any improvement to the software delivery process should speed up the rate with which we deliver value, not the rate with which we burn effort. For as long as we only track inputs – effort, story points, number of tasks – we’re essentially tracking time.

~ Gojko Adzic

If you know what you're doing, three layers is enough; if you don't, even seventeen levels won't help

~ Michael Padlipsky, The Elements of Networking Style

OO languages make abstraction easy — perhaps too easy. They encourage architectures with thick glue and elaborate layers. This can be good when the problem domain is truly complex and demands a lot of abstraction, but it can backfire badly if coders end up doing simple things in complex ways just because they can.

~ Eric Steven Raymond

In XP we turn all the dials up to 10, not up to Reasonable.

~ RonJeffries

TDD is about incremental change and improvement. It is great for finding local maxima but the best solution might require a radical rethink. The opportunity cost in this case is that we get trapped in this local maximum and miss a bigger win.

~ Dan North