I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.

I started out as a BASIC programmer. Some people would say that I'm permanently damaged. Some people are undoubtedly right... But I'm not going to apologize for that. All language designers have their occasional idiosyncracies. I'm just better at it than most.

I am the world's worst C programmer because it's so complicated I can't understand it [...] All I know is that whenever I write C, my pointers are always missed by one from where they're supposed to go.

An easy tell for how good an engineer is is what % of their time they spend on instrumentation, measurement, profiling, telemetry, analysis (and how well they leverage this expertise during incidents).

For AI to outperform human coders, the context and prompt will need to be enriched with data from the live production system. This will lead to self-improving, self-repairing software.

I may be no better, but at least I am different.

I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being.

You're a programmer, you've just written 100 lines of codes that C++ programmers have failed to do. You want to show it to people because you're quite pleased. You think they're going to be pleased...

Nobody actually creates perfect code the first time around, except me. But there's only one of me.

Whose it gonna be!? Whose it gonna be?! Whoever it is, I am better than them!

Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something. If someone is better than you at something, then it’s likely because she has failed at it more than you have. If someone is worse than you, it’s likely because he hasn’t been through all of the painful learning experiences you have.

You're not perfect just the way you are. You could be better!

I was really, really bad at writing parsers. I still am really bad at writing parsers.

I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.

That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.