20th-century Engineer Quotes

Building software implies various stages of planning, preparation and execution that vary in kind and degree depending on what's being built. [...]
Building a four-foot tower requires a steady hand, a level surface, and 10 undamaged beer cans. Building a tower 100 times that size doesn't merely require 100 times as many beer cans.

The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal, and in 1776, that's exactly what they meant. Women could not vote, women could not own property, and blacks were considered property. After 200 years of enlightenment, we have realized that gender and race are inappropriate distinctions for determining who has individual rights. Anytime Gov gives you permission they let you know that you have permission by giving you a permit or a license. If you have a marriage license, what permission do you have to do now that you did not have permission to do before, who gave you that permission, and who gave them the authority to give you that permission in the first place?

Michael Badnarik
Michael Badnarik
In the near future, the web is going to be the master copy of human knowledge. We need to figure out ways to use that knowledge.

Håkon Wium Lie
Håkon Wium Lie
One advantage of static factory methods is that, unlike constructors, they have names.

Joshua Bloch
Joshua Bloch
The greatest risk we face in software development is that of overestimating our own knowledge.

Sometimes it is more difficult to formulate the criterion for a problem than to state the question itself.

The world about us can be looked at in a variety of ways. One way is to see the world as made up from many interacting systems: weather, societal, economic, ecological, floral, faunal, tectonic plate, oceanic, and so on. This is very much a connected view of the world: nothing is isolated and totally independent; everything is part of something bigger, and everything comprises many interacting parts — subsystems.

Like concepts such as national energy policy or war on drugs, competitiveness covers a lot of territory

Successful visionaries start from where they are, what they have, and what their customers have.