Austen Allred > Austen's Quotes

“Alan was slow to learn that indistinct line that separated initiative from disobedience.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“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 and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“fundamentally, experience precedes technical knowledge. We”
― W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance

“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

“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

“Taste is developing a refined sense of judgment and finding the balance that produces a pleasing and integrated whole.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it [a product] looks like. People think it’s this veneer—that the designers are handed this box and told, “Make it look good!” That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
― Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

“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

“Within this process, every individual act of building is a process in which space gets differentiated. It is not a process of addition, in which preformed parts are combined to create a whole, but a process of unfolding, like the evolution of an embryo, in which the whole precedes the parts, and actually gives birth to them, by splitting.”
― Christopher W. Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building