Top 5 Attributes of Highly Effective Programmers by Ben Watson I picked out a few of my favorite quotes, but you should go and read the whole thing. Humility Humility is first because it implies all the other attributes, or at least enables them. Simply put, humility is an understanding that the world doesn’t begin and end with you. It’s accepting that you don’t know everything there is to know about WPF, or Perl, or Linux.

Astrid Atkinson from Google speaking about Engineering for the Long Game at O'Reilly Velocity conference. Here are some points that stuck out to me: Your job is not to limit growth. When you're trying to keep complexity in check, one of the worst things you can do is say "You can't launch this, it's too complex, it's going to make things worse" You want to be enabling all the growth the product can provide.

From "The Psychology of Computer Programming" by Gerald M. Weinberg Jerry tells a great story about the perils of personality and how two different programmers were affecting the entire department: Personality, being the totality of factors contributing to our individuality, is displayed in everything we do or say. In particular, it is reflected in our programs, and, even more particularly, in how those programs look to the machine operators. The chief systems programmer, who, by the nature of his duties, was in face-to-face contact with both programmers and operators, had observed that the operators often had disparaging comments to make about certain programmers.

Nina Zakherenko gave a great talk at PyCon 2015 called Technical Debt - The Monster in Your Closet that you need to watch. Go ahead, watch it. I'll wait… … Great! Hope you enjoyed it. That got me thinking about where the term came from. In 1992 Ward Cunningham said: Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite… The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid.