Productivity is most important by engineering management rules, but enjoyment is most important for engineers. One stems from the other.

Fancy algorithms are slow when N is small, and N is usually small.

Caches aren't architecture, they're just optimization.

Narrowness of experience leads to narrowness of imagination

Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad.

There's nothing in computing that can't be broken by another level of indirection.

Such is modern computing: everything simple is made too complicated because it's easy to fiddle with; everything complicated stays complicated because it's hard to fix.