The wages of sin is debugging.

Branching is easy. Merging is hard.

Code never lies, comments sometimes do.

Simple, not easy. There's a difference.

OK, he's a Yankees fan. Now I know why I don't like him.

There were no PCs when I started programming on computers.

Teaching peers is one of the best ways to develop mastery.

Scrum is like your mother-in-law, it points out ALL your faults.

Competition on anything is good, because it makes everybody better.

The easier you make it for people to go, the more likely they are to stay.

We have to stop optimizing for programmers and start optimizing for users.

Mac people use their computers; Windows people put up with their computers

We've got the best product pipeline that I've seen in my 25 years at Apple.

Any Scrum without working product at the end of a sprint is a failed Scrum.

If there's only one answer, then this must not be a very interesting topic.

I looked up 'standard' in the dictionary. There are eleven different definitions.

Net neutrality is a concept that the tech industry rallies around, but it is hypocrisy.

If you need the approval of the platform vendor to ship an app, then it isn't a platform.

It seems to me to be important to distinguish a good idea from poor implementations of it

I expected higher prices for some books, but [there would be] flexibility for other books.

Greatness can’t be imposed; it has to come from within. But it does live within all of us.

If you don't have people that care about usability on your project, your project is doomed.

This is an important part of the Internet Dynamic - providing opportunity and not guarantees.

Another person who's smarter than I. What a relief to not have to be the smartest guy anymore.

The fruits of all our labors have left us as we started. To grow without is not to grow within.

We are still in the infancy of naming what is really happening on software development projects.

You can achieve a shallow local maximum with A/B testing - but you'll never win hearts and minds.

You get the software you pay for. In every sense. To the nth degree. That's the way the world works.

Three bloody roles, Scrum has, and only three. If you can’t get that right, don’t call it Scrum, OK?

If Sun were to hand the management of Java over to a committee of monkeys, would it be more successful?

I consider C++ the most significant technical hazard to the survival of your project and do so without apologies.

Just six days after its release on iTunes, a record-breaking 33 million people have already listened to the album.

When we use a language, we should commit ourselves to knowing it, being able to read it, and writing it idiomatically.

Reusing pieces of code is like picking off sentences from other people's stories and trying to make a magazine article.

Next time, please pay a fair price for the services you depend on. Those have a better chance of surviving the bubbles.

When I'm old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say 'wow, that was an adventure,' not 'wow, I sure felt safe.'

Patents? Disappointed? Don't think of it that way. Software patents weren't feasible then so we chose not to risk $10,000.

I estimate that 75% of those organizations using Scrum will not succeed in getting the benefits that they hope for from it.

Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information.

VisiCalc took 20 hours of work per week for some people and turned it out in 15 minutes and let them become much more creative.

One of the great skills in using any language is knowing what not to use, what not to say. There's that simplicity thing again.

Bootstrapping is a way to do something about the problems you have without letting someone else give you permission to do them.

I'm not rich because I invented VisiCalc, but I feel that I've made a change in the world. That's a satisfaction money can't buy.

Focusing on skills, communications, and community allows the project to be more effective and more agile than focusing on processes and plans.

My mom is from Cuba, my dad is from Spain, and I grew up in Miami. So there's maybe a little more flair in me than typical Silicon Valley types.

I've always felt that technology companies have disrespected the content creation process, and the content creation people disrespect technology.

The infrastructure of the US is a long-term suspension of disbelief that such things won't be exploded deliberately by people who don't create anything.

One thing you know, if you've been in technology a while, you're only as good as the last thing you did. No one wants an original iPod. No one wants an iPhone 3GS.

Writing code? That's the easy part. Getting your application in the hands of users, and creating applications that people actually want to use - now that's the hard stuff.

When I evaluate a candidate, one of the most important criteria is what I call “the first derivative.” Is this person learning? Is this candidate moving forward, or have they stagnated.

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