Kate > Kate's Quotes

“Most testers I’ve known are perverse enough that if you tell them the “happy path” through the application, that’s the last thing they’ll do. It should be the same with load testing.”
― Michael T. Nygard, Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

“Software design as taught today is terribly incomplete. It talks only about what systems should do. It doesn’t address the converse—things systems should not do. They should not crash, hang, lose data, violate privacy, lose money, destroy your company, or kill your customers.”
― Michael T. Nygard, Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

“Code without tests is bad code. It doesn't matter how well written it is; it doesn't matter how pretty or object-oriented or well-encapsulated it is. With tests, we can change the behavior of our code quickly and verifiably. Without them, we really don't know if our code is getting better or worse.”
― Michael Feathers, Working Effectively with Legacy Code

“I say that humans are the only ones in this world that need everything within it...But there is nothing in the world that needs us for its survival. We aren't the masters of the earth. We're the servants.”
― Joseph Boyden, The Orenda

“The creation myths of the various peoples and religions of the world pale when compared to the glory of the big bang. The three-billion-year history of life’s evolution from self-reproducing molecules to civilization contains twists and romances that cannot be matched by any myth or epic. There is also the poetic vision of space and time in relativity, the weird subatomic world of quantum mechanics … these wondrous stories of science all possess an irresistible attraction. Through the medium of science fiction, I seek only to create my own worlds using the power of imagination, and to make known the poetry of Nature in those worlds, to tell the romantic legends that have unfolded between Man and Universe.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner. This”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“It’s all generated, maybe, by the fact that the attitude of the populace is to try to find the answer instead of trying to find a man who has a way of getting at the answer.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist

“I got as far as Berlin. I put my signature on the Reichstag: “I, Sofya Kuntsevich, came here to kill war.” When I see a common grave, I kneel before it. Before every common grave…always on my knees…”
― Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II

“We spend so much time urging children to trust us to help them with their problems. Yet we don’t even have the courage to let them read books in which those problems are named for what they are, or to let them freely talk about those problems. So the question I have is this: Why should children trust us? That’s the part that I think the censors have not thought through carefully.”
― Leonard S. Marcus, You Can't Say That! Writers for Young People Talk About Censorship, Free Expression, and the Stories They Have to Tell

“The future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She must have knowledge. She must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion. The present mincing horror at free womanhood must pass if we are ever to be rid of the bestiality of free manhood; not by guarding the weak in weakness do we gain strength, but by making weakness free and strong. —W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil”
― Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

“Hobbies are a way of staying present so humans do not have to think about death. Yet the inevitable looms and grows.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Beautyland

“The Trump years amazed a certain kind of white person; they had no reference for national vulgarity, for such broad corruption and venality, until it was too late. The least reflective of them say, “This is not America.” But some of them suspect that it is America, and there is great pain in understanding that, without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime, in learning that the whole game was rigged in your favor, that there are nations within your nation who have spent all of their collective lives in the Trump years. The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message