One of the things I like about Kindle (Amazon’s eBook reader) is that you can highlight paragraphs or phrases in books. I do this regularly, so when I do not feel like reading much, I often review the notes or quotes I have marked in books I liked a lot. I imagine this functionality exists in eReaders from other manufacturers as well.
Similarly, when you read any book, Kindle tells you which sections have been most underlined by other readers, which can help you detect important ideas that have caught their attention.
Driven by curiosity, these days I bought one of my books in electronic format, The Black Book of the Programmer, because it is the one that has been published the longest and the one with the most comments on the various platforms where it is sold, precisely to find out, out of simple curiosity, whether it had many or few notes, or to discover which paragraphs may have caught the attention of enough readers as to appear in Kindle with the label “148 people highlighted this,” to give an example, like the screenshot below:
These are the notes most highlighted by readers—phrases that, in my opinion, are quite inspiring:
“The genius of a good software developer lies in knowing how to find simple solutions to problems that seem complicated.”
“Software development is a highly creative activity; therefore, it needs an environment that encourages this activity, not one that destroys or stifles it.”
“We should incorporate quality testing into our DNA as developers as we move forward in our work.”
“Before considering something finished, such as a new class or a feature, we should ask ourselves whether there is anything we can do to improve or simplify it.”
“The ability to learn from mistakes and recover from failure is called resilience, and since we work in a discipline where the mechanisms for making mistakes are so readily available and so ephemeral, a good software developer must have this ability: we learn more from mistakes than from successes.”
“The art of programming requires a highly creative, lucid, calm, optimistic, and positive environment.”
“You cannot create anything—neither software, nor art, nor even a garden—while looking for excellence in a demotivating and non-creative environment.”
“In software, beautiful and elegant means easy and cheap to evolve and maintain.”
“We are effective to the extent that we reuse and write reusable code. This is one of my mantra phrases that I repeat constantly.”
It is hard to describe the gratification one feels when you realize that some of your ideas have resonated with others who are trying to improve in their profession.