What's Your Favorite IT Quote or Rule? And How Does It Influence Your Work?

My favorite quote is from Frederick Brooks in his book, The Mythical Man-month:

• The flawed nine pregnant women project management model, about adding more people to a project: "If it takes a woman Nine months to produce a baby, then nine pregnant women can produce a baby in one month.

Keep it simple stupid.

PS: Keeping things simple is hardest part :)

Everyone brings something to the table and by how he feels and acts regarding and about this fact tells a whole story. That's why I am as I am.

be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

--RFC 761 of the TCP protocol

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
-Martin Fowler (co-author of Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

I keep that in mind whenever I modify existing code or write new code.

Talk is cheap,show me the code

The harder your code is to read, the harder it is for people to replace you

Paraphrasing Johnson & Fowler: "Software architecture is a shared understanding of the things that are important."
This really encapsulates everything about my approach to software architecture:

1. Make sure everyone understands how we want the software to be built.
2. Focus on the important stuff. Focus on the things that are hard to change later, focus on exit strategies for when you do need to change them.
3. Don't get lost in details. Strict adherence to patterns doesn't solve problems. Patterns are guidelines. Formalizing every piece of the architecture makes you lose sight of the bigger picture - the important stuff.

"The future is not binary." - Meredith Whittaker

As a nonbinary person, Meredith Whittaker's quote reminds me that technology should not only be inclusive of diverse gender identities, but that it has the potential to expand beyond the binary limitations of traditional societal structures.

Any probability repeated often enough becomes a certainty.
Comes into play when i hear things like: "But that is unlikely to happen" or "It's too rare to consider".
Mostly heard by people who don't deal with a) the consequences of "rare" events, b) new devs/non-techies who don't understand the scale of how fast computers can make 1 error into milions c) people who don't grok Murphy's law