Austen Allred

“The third worry of the pointy-haired boss, the difficulty of hiring programmers, I think is a red herring. How many hackers do you need to hire, after all? Surely by now we all know that software is best developed by teams of less than ten people. And you shouldn’t have trouble hiring hackers on that scale for any language anyone has ever heard of. If you can’t find ten Lisp hackers, then your company is probably based in the wrong city for developing software. In fact, choosing a more powerful language probably decreases the size of the team you need, because (a) if you use a more powerful language, you probably won’t need as many hackers, and (b) hackers who work in more advanced languages are likely to be smarter.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“Over time, I came to the conclusion that designing an excellent user experience was as much about preventing negative experiences as facilitating positive ones.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“One day a man walked into a London agency and asked to see the boss. He had bought a country house and was about to open it as a hotel. Could the agency help him to get customers? He had $500 to spend. Not surprisingly, the head of the agency turned him over to the office boy, who happened to be the author of this book. I invested his money in penny postcards and mailed them to well-heeled people living in the neighborhood. Six weeks later the hotel opened to a full house. I had tasted blood.”
― David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising

“A better justification is that people can type on a smartphone QWERTY keyboard without thinking about it. The keyboard can melt away, it can recede, and when it does, it leaves a space for what people really care about.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs