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This page contains some quotations from books and other sources, which resonated with me when I first encountered them.

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What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure

  • Dr Samuel Johnson

I encountered this while reading Deirdre McCloskey's brilliant book, Economical Writing. It's as pithy when applied to code as it is when applied to English.

Make the change easy, then make the easy change.

  • Kent Beck, in various places

This describes how I work, and have worked for a number of years now. It is a wonderful way of building.

My early experiences in Singapore and Malaya shaped my views about the claim of the press to be the defender of truth and freedom of speech. The freedom of the press was the freedom of its owners to advance their personal and class interests.

  • Lee Kuan Yew, in his memoir, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story 1965 - 2000

Consider the state of journalism, popular media and adult education in the UK in 2022 (the time of writing this), and how different our situation might be today if these things were not treated as vehicles for billionaires (e.g. Murdoch) and foreign criminals (e.g. Putin) to advance their personal and class interests.

Our culture emphasizes that as leaders we must be wiser, set direction, and articulate values, all of which predisposes us to tell, rather than ask.

  • Edgar H. Schein, in Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking instead of Telling

When I read this it reminded me immediately of one of principles of Sydney Dekker's Safety Differently. Instead of telling people what to do, we can empower them to make safer and therefore more performant systems by asking people what they need.

Safety currently: - People are the problem - We should tell them what to do - We measure success by the absence of negatives (e.g. counting safety incidents)

Safety differently: - People are the solution - We should ask them what they need - We measure success by the presence of positive capabilities (e.g. counting them)

  • Sydney Dekker, in a slide of a 'Safety Differently' lecture

This slide has significantly impacted my understanding of safety in software. In theory, precisely prescribed processes promise protection against safety incidents. Yet in practice, such prescription breaks down in the face of the world's complexity, and we are forced to deal with the lived realities of people working on the ground in order to make progress on safety. I believe software development has so much to gain from this outlook on safety, if only it were adopted more widely.

Human experience shows that people, not organizations or management systems, get things done.

A truism worth remembering.

Though wars can still bring adventures which can stir the heart, their true nature is of innumerable personal tragedies, of grief, waste and sacrifice, wholly evil and not redeemed by glory. To ascribe glory to the violent death of any young man loving life is only to add further folly to the failure of human wisdom which is the cause of war.

  • David Howarth in The Shetland Bus

People who lived through WW2 know something about themselves and each other that we hopefully will never find out. I just hope that we can forever retain what they learned the hard way. ('Lest we forget' etc.)

Created on 2022-08-19

Updated on 2026-01-01