“There’s a common and weird conception in this country of The Great Idea. This is the idea of PageRank, a graphical user interface, or sticky notes. Huge successes, right? Sure. But for 99% of people, The Great Idea is a big fat myth.”

“It’s a funny thing. After almost twenty years of drawing a paycheque for creating software, people generally want to hire me because they want me to duplicate the successes I’ve had. The model seems to be ‘do the things you’ve done successfully before, and you’ll be successful now.’ My experience is that this has never worked on its own. Success in software development is at least as much about avoiding failure modes as it is about ‘best practices.’”