Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.

Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework.

If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.

A software system is transparent when you can look at it and immediately see what is going on. It is simple when what is going on is uncomplicated enough for a human brain to reason about all the potential cases without strain

The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1.

Equally, the Internet interprets attempts at proprietary control as threats and mobilizes to defeat them.

The combination of threads, remote-procedure-call interfaces, and heavyweight object-oriented design is especially dangerous... if you are ever invited onto a project that is supposed to feature all three, fleeing in terror might well be an appropriate reaction.