[confluence]

"Have strong opinions - weakly held" is probably what he meant: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/05/strong-opinions-wea...

One should be able to hold multiple conflicting ideas in one's head (double think), each with varying amounts of evidence depending on the current situation. Furthermore, one should be able to switch between said ideas quickly and easily depending on what is needed to successfully complete the task at hand.

For example:

If you want high perf/dollar when doing a data analysis across billions of rows you know that you should run on a commodity cluster and with bare metal high performant C++.

You also know that if you want to get something done really quickly (elegant - not performant/efficient), you stick to what you know (Python/Ruby/Perl etc.) and get it done today. You know that if need be, you can just scale it out later with a more performant architecture.

Both opinions are strong. Both are weakly held. The best one wins depending on the situation.