Jeff Atwood:

This is still one of my favorite quotes about soft­ware. It’s some­thing we inter­nal­ized heav­ily when build­ing Stack Over­flow. Get­ting the details right is the dif­fer­ence between some­thing that delights, and some­thing cus­tomers tolerate.

Your soft­ware, your prod­uct, is noth­ing more than a col­lec­tion of tiny details. If you don’t obsess over all those details, if you think it’s OK to con­cen­trate on the “impor­tant” parts and con­tinue to ignore the other umpteen dozen tiny lit­tle ways your prod­uct annoys the peo­ple who use it on a daily basis – you’re not cre­at­ing great software.

Jeremy Keith:

I think our col­lec­tive obses­sion with try­ing to nail down “com­mon” break­points has led to a fun­da­men­tal mis­un­der­stand­ing about the nature of respon­sive design: it’s not about what hap­pens at the break­points — it’s about what hap­pens between the breakpoints.

Rachel Lovinger:

It’s impor­tant to under­stand that most CMSs have a bias. They’re often designed around a cer­tain “unit” of con­tent and that’s what they’re opti­mized to cre­ate. For blog appli­ca­tions, the unit is a post. For Share­point, a unit is a doc­u­ment. For most web con­tent man­age­ment tools a unit is a web­page, even though we’re more likely to be mak­ing dynamic sites that use (and reuse) con­tent in a vari­ety of configurations.

Most CMSs, but not all. There are many rea­sons to love Sym­phony CMS, but this is one of the eas­i­est for new users to grasp: there are no pre­con­ceived notions of con­tent struc­ture, and Sym­phony makes it dead sim­ple to quickly cre­ate a model to match your exact needs. If your CMS is forc­ing you to use its markup or its data model, it’s doing it wrong.

Scott Adams:

I’m fas­ci­nated by the dis­cus­sion of how Jobs devel­oped what became known as the Real­ity Dis­tor­tion Field. Appar­ently Jobs had a life­long bat­tle with real­ity and won.

Marco Arment:

The Innovator’s Patent Agree­ment is a nice sen­ti­ment, but the loop­hole poten­tial is sim­ply too great, and it doesn’t (and can’t) address the fun­da­men­tal prob­lems and dys­func­tion in the patent system.

Ben Kelly, designer of The Hacienda:

There were 3 or 4 huge steel beams on the dance floor, which could be unsafe and so the stripes served as a sort of warn­ing for patrons.

William Henry Channing:

To live con­tent with small means; to seek ele­gance rather than lux­ury, and refine­ment rather than fash­ion; to be wor­thy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to lis­ten to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think qui­etly, act frankly, talk gen­tly, await occa­sions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spir­i­tual, unbid­den and uncon­scious, grow up through the com­mon — this is my symphony.

Fred­eric W. Goudy found his call­ing late in life:

At 40, this short, plump, pink­ish, and puck­ish gen­tle­man kept books for a Chicago real­tor, and con­sid­ered him­self a fail­ure. Dur­ing the next 36 years, start­ing almost from scratch at an age when most men are per­ma­nently set in their cho­sen voca­tions, he cut 113 fonts of type, thereby cre­at­ing more usable faces than did the seven great­est inven­tors of type and books, from Guten­berg to Gara­mond. Now 76, he is the dean of twentieth-​century designers.

Sir Jonathan Ive:

We strug­gle with the right words to describe the design process at Apple, but it is very much about design­ing and pro­to­typ­ing and mak­ing. When you sep­a­rate those, I think the final result suffers.

Penn Jil­lette:

…free­dom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have dis­pos­able income that I’ll spend to find out how to get peo­ple more of it.

The story is almost a decade old, but unfor­tu­nately just as rel­e­vant as the day it was written.

Andy Budd:

Through my trav­els I get to speak to lots of design­ers and devel­op­ers, and am con­stantly amazed by how smart, knowl­edge­able and engaged these folks are. These peo­ple care pas­sion­ately about doing the right thing, but are thwarted time and time again. It’s not clients get­ting in the way and it’s def­i­nitely not the blog­gers and authors build­ing their influ­ence. It’s the com­pa­nies they work for actively pre­vent­ing them from doing good work.