One of my favorite authors is Gerald Weinberg. His humility, sense of humor, insights, and practical advice are refreshing. If I understand correctly, his last blog post was on 2018-07-29, and he passed away a few days later on 2018-08-07 at the age 84. Even at an advanced age and in declining health, he still shared clear thoughts:
Generally, the most powerful learning occurs when someone produces a better solution than you had imagined. If your ego cannot deal with “better” or even “different” solutions to problems you pose, you have no business being in a leadership position in software engineering.
A number of people, some as authoritative as Edsger Dijkstra, have claimed that ability in native language - reading and writing - is the single most important asset a programmer can have. — Gerald M. Weinberg
And now that we are programming a lot in Markdown, this is more important than ever …
An amateur programmer is looking for a way to get the job done… the professional, conversely, is learning about his profession, and the problem being programmed is only an incidental step in his process of development. — Gerald M. Weinberg
This is even more critical in the age of AI. Architecture still matters.