Quotes from Jeff Atwood

When given a choice, choose the thing that scares you a little. If it's 100% safe, it is holding you back.

If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right.

I always suspected that programmers became programmers because they got to play God with the little universe boxes on their desks.

Build what you need as you need it, aggressively refactoring as you go along; don't spend a lot of time planning for grandiose, unknown future scenarios. Good software can evolve into what it will ultimately become.

worst team member is the best predictor of how any team performs. It doesn't seem to matter how great the best member is,

If you give a good idea to a mediocre group, they'll screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a good group, they'll fix it. Or they'll throw it away and come up with something else.

We should always be in pursuit of simplicity, in whatever form it takes.

As a software developer, you are your own worst enemy. The sooner you realize that, the better off you'll be.

So much of leadership is learning to give a damn about other people, something that we programmers are notoriously bad at.

The toughest thing in life is not learning a bunch of potentially hypothetically useful stuff, but figuring out what the heck it is you want to do.

Being an expert isn't telling other people what you know. It's understanding what questions to ask, and flexibly applying your knowledge to the specific situation at hand. Being an expert means providing sensible, highly contextual direction.

In my experience, the more isolated the developers, the worse the resulting end product. It

the ultimate unit test is whether or not users want to use your application. All the other tests you write are totally irrelevant until you can get that one to pass.

2. Help others instead of yourself

we programmers spend our lives writing code so that our fellow human beings no longer need to write code

3. Buy many small pleasures instead of few big ones

If you do not trust your people, you will not get their whole-hearted effort and you will not capitalize on the enormous creative potential of cohesive and motivated teamwork. It

Success is rarely determined by the quality of your ideas. But it is frequently determined by the quality of your execution.

even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age four, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. The

But everyone should try writing a little code, because it somehow sharpens the mind, right?

I'm constantly running across comments from developers who don't seem to understand that the code already tells us how it works; we need the comments to tell us why it works. Code comments

Oftentimes, the whole reason we became programmers in the first place is because we wanted to move beyond being a mere player and change the game, control it, modify its parameters, maybe even create our own games.

how you spend your money has a strong influence on how happy — or unhappy — it will make you. And, again, there's science behind this.

8. Follow the herd instead of your head