Quote Of The Week

2nd Quote of the Week 28 “ 'Vibe' stands for Very Incomplete, Brittle Experiment.” ― Julian Goldstahl Triggered by the response to Gary Marcus' tweet about 'vibe coding': Always thought "vibe" stands for Very Incomplete, Brittle Experiment. — Julian Goldstahl ack/me (@JulianGoldstahl) July 8, 2025

Quote of the Week 28 " The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible. " ― Stephen King  (variation of a quote by Oscar Wilde)   " The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable. " ― Oscar Wilde     Triggered by King's tweet last week reflecting on the positive consumer reaction to Meta Thread vs. X Twitter.   Musk vs. Zuckerberg reminds me of what Oscar Wilde had to say about fox hunting: the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible. — Stephen King (@StephenKing) July 7, 2023    

Quote of the Week 26 " So GPT-4 is actually 8 expert raccoons in a trenchcoat. " ― Sasha Luccioni   Triggered by the citation of Luccioni's tweet in the article " GPT-4's Secret Has Been Revealed " by Alberto Romero. So GPT-4 is actually 8 expert raccoons in a trenchcoat 😂 https://t.co/eRWhcZoJ5l — Dr. Sasha Luccioni 💻🌎🦋✨🤗 (@SashaMTL) June 20, 2023 Image created with Microsoft Bing Image Creator (powered by DALL-E):  

Quote of the Week 22 "A computer  is the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds. " ― Steve Jobs Triggered by the use of the quote in a Microsoft keynote by Satya Nadella last week:

Quote of the Week 16 " Nukes don't make stronger nukes. But AI makes stronger AI. " ― Aza Raskin  (The A.I. Dilemma)  Triggered by the use of the quote in the thought-provoking (and controversial) talk " The A.I. Dilemma " by  Aza Raskin and Tristan Harris : BTW, I was not able to find another reference of the Yuval Harari quote they used in the presentation. [ LinkedIn ]

Quote of the Week 14 " Large Language Models are going to do to human discourse what fossil fuels did to climate. " ― Alan Cooper  Triggered by Alan 's tweet : Large Language Models are going to do to human discourse what fossil fuels did to climate. — Alan Cooper (@MrAlanCooper) March 31, 2023 See also " I am not afraid of robots. I am afraid of people. " by Gary Marcus: " ... the reality is that large language models remain exactly what I have always described them to be: bulls in a china shop, powerful, reckless, and difficult to control. Making new systems that are “more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal” should literally be at the top of everyone’s agenda." [ LinkedIn ]

Quote of the Week 12 " Business outcomes measure the health of the business. Product outcomes measure a change in customer behavior. " ― Teresa Torres Triggered by a discussion of how to align product development goals with business goals in the context of an OKR initiative. My take which is  influenced by T. Torres and others including M. Cagan and T. Herbig :  In the triangle of "business", "customer", and "product", do not try to directly derive the product objectives from the [internal] business objectives, instead look at the [external] business impact for the customer first. See also " What’s the Difference Between OKRs and Outcomes? " by Teresa Torres: "Product teams don’t typically have direct influence over business metrics like increasing revenue. But they do have the ability to directly influence product outcomes—changes in customer behavior—that can ultimately contribute to business outcomes." As Melissa Suzuno st...

Quote of the Week 4 "W hat makes great products: it is not process; it is content. " ― Steve Jobs Triggered by the content of the video clip in Marty Cagan's " Master Class " presentation @ 19:25 minutes. See also: Cited by many including Max Pucher : "You know what it is? People get confused. Companies get confused. When they start getting bigger they want to replicate their original success. And they start to think that somehow there is some magic in the process of how that success was created. So they start to try to institutionalize the process across the company. And before very long people get very confused and think that the process is the content. That was ultimately the downfall of IBM. IBM has the best process people in the world; they just forgot about the content. And that’s what happened a little bit at Apple, too. We had a lot of people who were great at management process; they just didn’t have a clue as to the content. And in my career I fo...

Quote of the Week 1 "W e do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy . " ― The Programmers' Credo  Triggered by a tweet of a slight variation of the credo : “ W e do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy .” Startups. pic.twitter.com/a46o5YO1H8 — Kunal Shah (@kunalb11) December 28, 2022 A play on John F. Kennedy's " We choose to go to the moon " speech  ( Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort,  September 12, 1962): “ W e do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard .”   [ LinkedIn ]

Quote of the Week 51 "B e conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept . " ― Jon Postel (Postel's Law) Triggered by the reference to Postel's law in a presentation on " API Definition and Test with Consumer Driven Contracts (CDC) " by Werner Eberling last week. A variation of the Robustness Principle : "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others." See also: "Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself." — Marcus Aurelius — Daily Stoic (@dailystoic) December 15, 2022 [ LinkedIn ]

Quote of the Week 50 " What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people . " ―  Josef Weizenbaum Triggered by the use of the quote in yesterday's tweet by Gary Marcus to comment on the recent ChatGPT euphoria: “What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” Josef Weizenbaum, creator of ELIZA h/t @Kobotic — Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) December 11, 2022 The LinkedIn post by Dr. Kobi Leins refers to the ELIZA Effect  which in turn references Weizenbaum's book " Computer Power and Human Reason " that contains the quote. [ LinkedIn ] 

Quote of the Week 49 " A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good . " ― Martin LeBlanc Triggered by the use of an app that should remain unnamed: A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good. — Martin LeBlanc (@martinleblanc) May 14, 2014 [ LinkedIn ] 

Quote of the Week 48 " Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce systems which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations . " ―  Melvin Conway ( Conway's Law ) In short :    " The product of any group reflects the structure of the group. " Even shorter:           " Architecture follows Organization " Triggered by the reference to a variant of Conway's Law in Fred Brooks's renowned book " T he Mythical Man Month: Essays on Software Engineering " (see quote of last week for a reference to Brooks's Law ). The original quote was used by Martin Fowler in his noteworthy October 2022 article   on the same subject:  " Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure . " Fowler states: "Important enough to affect every system I've come across, and powerful enough that you...

Quote of the Week 47 " Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later . " ― Fred Brooks  ( Brooks's Law ) Frederick P. Brooks, the author of the renowned book " T he Mythical Man Month: Essays on Software Engineering " that introduces this law, passed away last week (November 17, 2022) at the age of 91. [ LinkedIn ]

  Quote of the Week 39 " Agile now means, we do half of Scrum poorly and use Jira. " ―  Andy Hunt   Triggered by the use of the quote in  Agile & Scrum Don't Work | Allen Holub In The Engineering Room Ep. 9 .

Quote of the Week 36 " You are never one feature away from success and you never will be. " ― Teresa Torres Triggered by  Teresa Torres '  use of this statement (pg. 117) in her 2021 book " Continuous Discovery Habits " in the introduction to Chapter 7 " Prioritizing Opportunities, Not Solutions ". "For too long, product teams have defined their work as shipping the next release. When we engage with stakeholders, we talk about our roadmaps and our backlogs. During our performance reviews, we highlight all the great features we implemented.  The vast majority of our conversations take place in the solution space . We assume that success comes from launching features. This is what product thought leader Melissa Perri calls "the build trap ." This obsession with producing outputs is strangling us.  It's why we spend countless hours prioritizing features, grooming backlogs, and micro-managing releases. The hard reality is that...

Quote of the Week 50 " All complex systems that work, evolved from simpler systems that worked. " ―  Gall's Law Referenced by Werner Vogels in his recent AWS re:Invent 2021 keynote . Full quote according to Wikipedia : " A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. "

Quote of the Week 47 " After a while you learn that privacy is something you can sell, but you can't buy it back. " ―  Bob Dylan Stated in Dylan's 2004 memoir   Chronicles: Volume One . Triggered by  the use of the quote in Artur Varanda's master thesis The GDPR and Log Pseudonymization . See the paper  Log pseudonymization: Privacy maintenance in practice   for an excerpt of the research results in English.

Quote of the Week 44 "Continuous is more often than you think. " ―  Mike Roberts Triggered by the use of Roberts ' quote by Dave Farley in his presentation of the " Top 10 Rules For Continuous Integration ". Also cited in the last paragraph "Done Means Released" of Warren Veerasingam's blog article " Found: 7 Lost Principles of Continuous Delivery ".

Quote of the Week 29 "Software doesn’t age like fine wine; it ages like milk.   Software goes bad over time." ― Josh Corman Related quotes: "Code doesn't age like wine, it ages like milk." ― Chris Eng Triggered by Charity Major's use of a variation of the quote   "Software on the shelf doesn't age like wine; it ages like milk." in her  presentation  on Continuous Delivery where she argues that  software should be auto-deployed within 15 minutes after you merge it, with no manual gates.   Photo by Debby Hudson  on Unsplash The use of the full quote by Josh Corman can be found in a 2016 article . A later  blog article  acknowledges prior usage @ Microsoft. The attribution to Chris Eng has been made in a Lenovo presentation  (slide 9) and a CSO Online article  (cited here ). The origin of the quote, however, dates back to at least 2006 when Andy Ozment and Stuart E. Schechter authored a Usenix conference paper titled " Milk or Wi...