The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size
of his own skull; therefore, he approaches the programming task in
full humility" – Dijkstra

I’m currently reading Code Complete and I’m mind-blown by it.

It is surely a book I would recommend to every software engineer and I can understand why Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky do to. I haven’t finished this book yet but I’m sure it is having a profound impact in the way I develop my craft. Perhaps I wish I read it earlier. But maybe I am reading it now cause now I am prepared to read it and go through the work of assimilating and incorporating it in my work.

What I like about this quote is that on side it talks about the most important thing when developing software – managing complexity – which requires us to take measures to reduce it – like write clean code, make sound architecture decisions, document properly, etc. But I also like the fact that it talks about being humble. Probably humility is what wakes you up in the early morning to work on your side project, what helps you wade through fixing a bug, what acknowledge that there are always more things to learn. The more humble I get, the more I learn.

P.S. While writing this article I found this great article on the topic by Jeff Atwood.