Alan Chan

“An ugly system is one in which there are special interfaces for everything you want to do. Unix is the opposite. It gives you the building blocks that are sufficient for doing everything. That's what having a clean design is all about.”
― Linus Torvalds, Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

“A lot of people believe in working long days and doing dou­ble, triple, or even quadruple shifts. I'm not one of them. Neither Transmeta nor Linux has ever gotten in the way of a good night's sleep. In fact, if you want to know the honest truth, I'm a firm believer in sleep. Some people think that's just being lazy, but I want to throw my pillow at them. I have a perfectly good excuse, and I'm standing by it: You may lose a few hours of your produc­tive daytime if you sleep, oh, say, ten hours a day, but those few hours when you are awake you're alert, and your brain functions on all six cylinders. Or four, or whatever.”
― Linus Torvalds, Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

“It seems wrong to call it “business.” It seems wrong to throw all those hectic days and sleepless nights, all those magnificent triumphs and desperate struggles, under that bland, generic banner: business. What we were doing felt like so much more. Each new day brought fifty new problems, fifty tough decisions that needed to be made, right now, and we were always acutely aware that one rash move, one wrong decision could be the end. The margin for error was forever getting narrower, while the stakes were forever creeping higher.”
― Phil Knight, Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

“This probably also means that if and when we ever meet another intelligent life form in this universe, their first words are not likely to be "Take me to our leader." They're more likely to say "Party on, dude!”
― Linus Torvalds, Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary