A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
“Image interpretation is an art”-Farouk El-Baz, Director of the Boston University Center for Remote Sensing.
Often differences of opinion between smart people are differences of data-Marissa Mayer
“An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.”-Mahatma Gandhi
If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito. -Betty Reese
Think about how people are going to actually use things. Don’t get caught up in the wow. Don’t confuse enthusiasm with priority.
Always remember that at the end of the day, a fast but incomplete application is worthless. It is easy to distract yourself with performance tuning and design abstraction to the detriment of your application. The nature of the Web is such that a release-frequently methodology works very well. (There is little cost in releasing a “new version” of a Web site, since the end user is always coming back for the code.) This allows you to defer serious tuning of your code until it is required. Thus, the primary goal should be to create code that can be easily refactored.
Artists are by nature entrepreneurs, they’re just not called that,” Strickland says. “They have the ability to visualize something that doesn’t exist, to look at a canvas and see a painting. Entrepreneurs do that. That’s what makes them different from businesspeople. Businesspeople are essentially administrators. Entrepreneurs are by definition visionaries. Entrepreneurs and artists are interchangeable in many ways. The hip companies know that.”
The most important thing in software development is motivation. Motivation is local - if you aren’t motivated by what you are working on right now then chances are it’s not going to be anywhere near as good as it could be. In fact, it’s probably going to suck.
XML is like violence, if it doesn’t solve the problem, just use more.