Quotations in 2019
Filters: Type: quotation × Year: 2019 × Sorted by date
For creative work, you can’t cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone’s day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company.
— Tobi Lutke # 26th December 2019, 7:06 pm
Let’s agree that no matter what we call the situation that the humans who are elsewhere are at a professional disadvantage. There is a communication, culture, and context tax applied to the folks who are distributed. Your job as a leader to actively invest in reducing that tax.
— Michael Lopp # 3rd December 2019, 1:34 pm
In general, reviewers should favor approving a CL [code review] once it is in a state where it definitely improves the overall code health of the system being worked on, even if the CL isn’t perfect.
— Google Standard of Code Review # 28th November 2019, 5:40 am
With a sufficient number of users of an API,
it does not matter what you promise in the contract:
all observable behaviors of your system
will be depended on by somebody.
— Hyrum's Law # 21st November 2019, 10:45 pm
I have sometimes wondered how I would fare with a problem where the solution really isn’t in sight. I decided that I should give it a try before I get too old.
I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence (AGI).
I think it is possible, enormously valuable, and that I have a non-negligible chance of making a difference there, so by a Pascal’s Mugging sort of logic, I should be working on it.
— John Carmack # 14th November 2019, 1:18 am
Microservices are about scaling teams, not scaling tech
— Petrus Theron # 28th September 2019, 4:23 pm
If you’re a little shy at conferences, speaking is The Best way to break the ice. Nobody talks to you before the talk. Everybody want’s to talk to you afterwards, largely because they have a way in. As such, public speaking is bizarrely good for introverts.
— Andy Budd # 26th September 2019, 3:15 pm
People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystem are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?
— Greta Thunberg # 23rd September 2019, 8:28 pm
Anyone with solid knowledge of both SQL and genetic engineering want to write me an UPDATE query to turn me into a dinosaur?
— @simonw # 19th September 2019, 4 pm
Y’all decided you could send 6x as much script because the high-end could take it...but the next billion users can’t. There might have been budget for 2x, but not 6x. Not by a long shot.
— Alex Russell # 9th August 2019, 6:53 am
This is when I pull out “we don’t do that here.” It is a conversation ender. If you are the newcomer and someone who has been around a long time says “we don’t do that here”, it is hard to argue. This sentence doesn’t push my morality on anyone. If they want to do whatever it is elsewhere, I’m not telling them not to. I’m just cluing them into the local culture and values.
— Aja Hammerly # 5th August 2019, 3:59 pm
Documentation needs to include and be structured around its four different functions: tutorials, how-to guides, explanation and technical reference. Each of them requires a distinct mode of writing. People working with software need these four different kinds of documentation at different times, in different circumstances—so software usually needs them all.
— Daniele Procida # 3rd August 2019, 8:29 am
There’s a spectrum on YouTube between the calm section — the Walter Cronkite, Carl Sagan part — and Crazytown, where the extreme stuff is. If I’m YouTube and I want you to watch more, I’m always going to steer you toward Crazytown.
— Tristan Harris, former design ethicist at Google # 9th June 2019, 6:22 pm
Practical campaign security is a wood chipper for your hopes and dreams. It sits at the intersection of 19 kinds of status quo, each more odious than the last. You have to accept the fact that computers are broken, software is terrible, campaign finance is evil, the political parties are inept, the DCCC exists, politics is full of parasites, tech companies are run by arrogant man-children, and so on.
— Maciej Cegłowski # 30th May 2019, 12:03 pm
Imagine if you were really into the group Swervedriver in the mid-’90s but by 2019 someone was on CNBC telling you that Swervedriver represented, I don’t know, 10 percent of global economic growth, outpacing returns in oil and lumber. That’s the tech industry.
— Paul Ford # 15th May 2019, 3:44 pm
... the overall conclusion I reach is that we have so much to gain from making Django async-capable that it is worth the large amount of work it will take. I also believe, crucially, that we can undertake this change in an iterative, community-driven way that does not rely solely on one or two long-time contributors burning themselves out.
— Andrew Godwin # 10th May 2019, 2 am
We don’t like limits on discrimination and lending, so we’re gonna use machine learning, which is a form of money laundering for bias, a way to blame mathematical algorithms for desires to simply avoid rules that everybody else has to play by in this industry.
— Maciej Ceglowski # 8th May 2019, 11:11 pm
One of the standards you have to have demonstrated to being able to reach Principle Engineer inside Amazon is “Respect what has gone before”. It’s very likely you don’t know the why, what or how of it. Often what was written was the best that could be done to the constraints.
— Paul Graydon # 25th April 2019, 5:52 pm
Lots of people calling for more aggressive moderation seem to imagine that if they yell enough the companies have a thoughtful, unbiased and nuance-understanding HAL 9000 they can deploy. It’s really more like the Censorship DMV.
— Alex Stamos # 21st April 2019, 4:36 pm
In the five years since the shark was erected, no other examples have occurred … any system of control must make some small place for the dynamic, the unexpected, the downright quirky. I therefore recommend that the Headington Shark be allowed to remain.
— Peter Macdonald # 9th April 2019, 1:58 pm
For the Fairmont, the Tonga Room is an inherited embarrassment, as though it were a local lord whose ancestors captured a repellent goblin and chained him up in the cellar, but the goblin is inexplicably adored by the townsfolk and the children, who sneak the goblin food and treats, and cry when the goblin’s master moves to strike it.
— In the Basement of the King # 28th March 2019, 9:11 pm
Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.
— Howard H. Aiken # 17th March 2019, 3:15 pm
Metrics are lossily compressed logs. Traces are logs with parent child relationships between entries. The only reason we have three terms is because getting value from them has required different compromises to make them cost effective.
— Clint Sharp # 25th February 2019, 10:15 pm
In January, Facebook distributes a policy update stating that moderators should take into account recent romantic upheaval when evaluating posts that express hatred toward a gender. “I hate all men” has always violated the policy. But “I just broke up with my boyfriend, and I hate all men” no longer does.
— Casey Newton # 25th February 2019, 2:09 pm
This paper introduces Mesh, a plug-in replacement for malloc that, for the first time, eliminates fragmentation in unmodified C/C++ applications. Mesh combines novel randomized algorithms with widely-supported virtual memory operations to provably reduce fragmentation, breaking the classical Robson bounds with high probability. Mesh generally matches the runtime performance of state-of-the-art memory allocators while reducing memory consumption; in particular, it reduces the memory of consumption of Firefox by 16% and Redis by 39%.
— Mesh: Compacting Memory Management for C/C++ Applications # 18th February 2019, 3:26 pm
If you want the fastest website despite implementation difficulty, the answer is: SSR behind a CDN with assets in best compression formats (webp, Brotli, woff2) served over http2 (or 3) from same origin with JS as enhancement only
— Mike Sherov # 15th February 2019, 7:12 pm
Operations engineering does not consist of firefighting your shitty software, it is the science of delivering value to users.
— Charity Majors # 14th February 2019, 1:12 am
Private blockchains are completely uninteresting. (By this, I mean systems that use the blockchain data structure but don’t have the above three elements.) In general, they have some external limitation on who can interact with the blockchain and its features. These are not anything new; they’re distributed append-only data structures with a list of individuals authorized to add to it. Consensus protocols have been studied in distributed systems for more than 60 years. Append-only data structures have been similarly well covered. They’re blockchains in name only, and -- as far as I can tell -- the only reason to operate one is to ride on the blockchain hype.
— Bruce Schneier # 12th February 2019, 7:14 pm
Everyone is angry about CSS again. I’m not even going to try to summarize the arguments. However it always seems to boil down to the fact that CSS is simultaneously too easy to bother with, yet so hard it needs to be wrapped up in a ball of JavaScript in case it scares the horses.
— Rachel Andrew # 30th January 2019, 11:14 pm
Since Mozilla moved on from Firefox OS, its derivatives have shipped on an order of magnitude more devices than during its entire time under Mozilla’s leadership and it has gone on to form the basis of the third largest and fastest growing mobile operating system in the world.
— Ben Francis # 28th January 2019, 12:59 pm