matagus > matagus's Quotes

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Opportunities will present themselves. Recognize them, act on them.”
― Robert Ludlum, The Bourne Supremacy

“Music is the ultimate teacher.”
― Wassily Kandinsky

“Well I haven't fucked much with the past,
But I've fucked plenty with the future.

- Babelogue”
― Patti Smith, Patti Smith Collected Lyrics, 1970-2015: Lyrics, Reflections & Notes for the Future

“I've heard it said that the children of conflict seekers are raised to have the emotional control their parents lack and then some -that fighters raise peacemakers.”
― Scott Kelly, Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery

“One of Job's business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. " If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will," he said. So even though an Iphone might cannibalize sales of an IPod, or an IPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“Looking into the VAX, West had imagined he saw a diagram of DEC’s corporate organization. He felt that VAX was too complicated. He did not like, for instance, the system by which various parts of the machine communicated with each other; for his taste, there was too much protocol involved. He decided that VAX embodied flaws in DEC’s corporate organization. The machine expressed that phenomenally successful company’s cautious, bureaucratic style. Was this true? West said it didn’t matter, it was a useful theory.”
― Tracy Kidder, The Soul of A New Machine

“A YOUNG COMPUTER ENGINEER, known to be one of the most skillful in Westborough’s basement, said he had a fantasy about a better job than his. In it, he goes to work as a janitor for a computer company whose designs leave much to be desired. There, at night, disguised by mop and broom, he sneaks into the offices of the company’s engineers and corrects the designs on their blackboards and desks.”
― Tracy Kidder, The Soul of A New Machine

“Engineers want to produce something,” said Wallach. “I didn’t go to school for six years just to get a paycheck. I thought that if this is what engineering’s all about, the hell with it.” He went to night school, to get a master’s in business administration. “I was always looking for the buck. I’d get the M.B.A., go back to New York, and make some money,” he figured. But he didn’t really want to do that. He wanted to build computers.”
― Tracy Kidder, The Soul of A New Machine

“It was an IBM machine, archaic now but gaudy then. The university owned it, in effect, and it lay inside a room that none but the machine’s professional caretakers could enter during the day. But Alsing found out that a student could just walk into that room at night and play with the computer. Alsing didn’t drink much and he never took any other drugs. “I was a midnight programmer,” he confessed.”
― Tracy Kidder, The Soul of A New Machine

“About ten other young, male undergraduates regularly attended these sessions of midnight programming. “It was a whole subculture. It’s been popularized now, but it was a secret cult in my days,” said Alsing. “The game of programming—and it is a game—was so fascinating. We’d stay up all night and experience it. It really is like a drug, I think.” A few of his fellow midnight programmers began to ignore their girlfriends and eventually lost them for the sake of playing with the machine all night. Some started sleeping days and missed all their classes, thereby ruining their grades. Alsing and a few others flunked out of school.”
― Tracy Kidder, The Soul of A New Machine

“Among engineers generally, the most common form of ambition—the one made most socially acceptable—has been the desire to become a manager. If you don’t become one by a certain age, then in the eyes of many of your peers you become a failure. Among computer engineers, I think, the wish to manage must be a virtual instinct.”
― Tracy Kidder, The Soul of A New Machine

“Our data shows that Lean management and continuous delivery practices help improve software delivery performance, which in turn improves organizational performance. At the heart of Lean management is giving employees the necessary time and resources to improve their own work. This means creating a work environment that supports experimentation, failure, and learning, and allows employees to make decisions that affect their jobs.”
― Nicole Forsgren, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations

“Being a leader doesn’t mean you have people reporting to you on an organizational chart—leadership is about inspiring and motivating those around you. A good leader affects a team’s ability to deliver code, architect good systems, and apply Lean principles to how the team manages its work and develops products. All of these have a measurable impact on an organization’s profitability, productivity, and market share.”
― Nicole Forsgren, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations

“There is a reason our schools and offices are plastered with whiteboards. We acquire more information through vision than through all the other senses combined.1 Of the 100 billion neurons in our brains, approximately 20% are devoted to analyzing visual information.2 The visual-spatial learner thinks primarily in images. A study done by psychologist and founder of the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development, Linda Kreger Silverman, suggests that two-thirds of the population have a visual-spatial preference.3 The left hemisphere is sequential, analytical, and time-oriented. The right hemisphere perceives the whole, synthesizes, and apprehends movement in space. For visual-spatial learners, if the right hemisphere is not activated and engaged, then attention will be low and learning will be poor.”
― Dominica Degrandis, Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow

“Making work visible is one of the most fundamental things we can do to improve our work because the human brain is designed to find meaningful patterns and structures in what is perceived through vision. Thus, it makes sense that when we can’t see our work, we have a hard time managing it.”
― Dominica Degrandis, Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow

“Between Holberger and Veres there exists a kind of technical understanding that outruns the powers of speech. Most Hardy Boys share this specialist’s ESP to some degree. It’s a feeling that some good chess players say they share with worthy opponents, a kind of mind reading—what Holberger calls being “in sync.”
― Tracy Kidder, The Soul of A New Machine

“When the veterans in the group were growing up, computers were quite rare and expensive, but Veres went to school in the age when anyone with a little money and skill could make up a small personal system. Veres says that what he does at home is different enough from what he does at work to serve as recreation for him. At work he deals with hardware; when he’s at home, he focuses on software—reading programming manuals and creating new software for his own computer.”
― Tracy Kidder, The Soul of A New Machine

“The little room was a forest of equipment now. A couple of months had passed since Eagle had been cloned. Rasala had named the two new prototypes Tartis and Gallifrey, after the home planet and time machine of Dr. Who, the protagonist of a science fiction show on public TV. The two new machines were the first to run with the normal, full-speed 220-nanosecond clock. Like Dr. Who, Rasala explained, the purpose of these new prototypes was “to conquer time.” Mag tapes were spinning. There were disk drives everywhere.”
― Tracy Kidder, The Soul of A New Machine

“Adopting a remote, managerial point of view, you could say that the Eagle project was a case where a local system of management worked as it should: competition for resources creating within a team inside a company an entrepreneurial spirit, which was channeled in the right direction by constraints sent down from the top. But it seems more accurate to say that a group of engineers got excited about building a computer. Whether it arose by corporate bungling or by design, the opportunity had to be grasped.”
― Tracy Kidder, The Soul of A New Machine

“To be a good guide, the ScrumMaster must stay only one step ahead of the team and organization, pulling them out of their habits, norms, and customs. If he goes too far too fast, the team will most likely not understand what he is talking about. If, on the other hand, the ScrumMaster is at the same stage as they are, he is not challenging their status quo enough and they will not improve.”
― Zuzana Šochová, Great ScrumMaster, The: #ScrumMasterWay (Addison-Wesley Signature Series

“Matt Cohler, now a partner at Benchmark Capital, spent six years in his late twenties and early thirties being a lieutenant to CEOs at LinkedIn (me) and Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg). Most supertalented people want to be the front man; few play the consigliere role well. In other words, there’s less competition and significant opportunity to be an all-star right-hand man.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career

“Instead of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“As any numbers of radical theorists from Brecht through to Foucault and Badiou have maintained, emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“Nonetheless, his vision of high technology’s enhancing and empowering the individual, as opposed to serving some large institution, was quite radical for 1939—so radical, in fact, that it wouldn’t really take hold of the public’s imagination for another forty years, at which point it would reemerge as the central message of the personal-computer revolution.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“I can’t stress enough that these fixes are slow. This is because systems accumulate months or years of static, and you have to drain that all away. Conversely, the same properties that make these fixes slow to fix make them extremely durable once in effect!”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“The first phase of a planning cycle is exploring the different problems that you could pick to solve. It’s surprisingly common to skip this phase, but that, unsurprisingly, leads to inertia-driven local optimization. Taking the time to evaluate which problem to solve is one of the best predictors I’ve found of a team’s long-term performance.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“I believe that, at quickly growing companies, there are two managerial skills that have a disproportionate impact on your organization’s success: making technical migrations cheap, and running clean reorganizations.”
― Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

“But one man was way ahead of them all. That one had written a doctoral thesis at Utah in 1969 describing an idealized interactive computer called the FLEX machine. He had experimented with powerful displays and with computers networked in intricate configurations. On page after page of his dissertation he lamented the inability of the world’s existing hardware to realize his dream of an interactive personal computer. He set before science the challenge to build the machine he imagined, one with “enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store thousands of pages, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, and anything else you would like to remember and change.” To Taylor he was a soulmate and a profound thinker, capable of seeing a computing future far beyond anything even he could imagine. Among the computer scientists familiar with his ideas, half thought he was a crackpot and the other half a visionary. His name was Alan Kay.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

“The day he came to PARC for his job interview, Rick Jones invited him into his office and asked him a stock question. “What do you think your greatest achievement will be at PARC?” he asked. “It’ll be a personal computer,” Kay replied. “What’s that?” Spying a flat portfolio on Jones’s desk the size of a student’s notebook, Kay seized it and flipped it open. “This will be a flat-panel display,” he said, indicating the cover, which he held upright. “There’ll be a keyboard here on the bottom, and enough power to store your mail, files, music, artwork, and books. All in a package about this size and weighing a couple of pounds. That’s what I’m talking about.” He walked out, leaving Jones scratching his head and saying to himself, “Yeah, right.”
― Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age