berglr

You can fix things. You can make new and amazing things. Don’t take that ability lightly.

—This is Why You Spent All that Time Learning to Program

if you romanticize Unix, if you view it as a thing of perfection, then you lose your ability to imagine better alternatives and become blind to potentially dramatic shifts in thinking.

—Don’t Fall in Love With Your Technology

My point was that some developers view frameworks as ends unto themselves, and programming as the act of gluing together modules whose functionality only superficially resembles the software’s use case, leaving large gaps in coverage. Yet with enough drudgery, aggravation, and reimplementation, such gaps can be avoided entirely and the resulting solution can become surprisingly, conspicuously better than the status quo.

—An interview with Notational Velocity developer Zachary Schneirov – Surat Says

Good interface design is as transparent as possible, because I don’t want to have to think about it. I just want to write, or do whatever else I’m doing, and not have to think about whatever I’m doing it on.

—An interview with William Gibson

Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity. When I was CTO of a web design firm, I noticed in staff meetings that we only ever talked about process when we were avoiding talking about people. “We need a process to ensure that the client does not get half-finished design sketches” is code for “Greg fucked up.” The problem, of course, is that much of this process nevertheless gets put in place, meaning that an organization slowly forms around avoiding the dumbest behaviors of its mediocre employees, resulting in layers of gunk that keep its best employees from doing interesting work, because they too have to sign The Form Designed to Keep You From Doing The Stupid Thing That One Guy Did Three Years Ago.

—Clay Shirky in Wikis, Grafitti, and Process

Real ugliness is not harsh-looking syntax, but having to build programs out of the wrong concepts.

—Paul Graham in The Python Paradox