… among Google’s first 20 employees
Often differences of opinion between smart people are differences of data-Marissa Mayer
… Thoughts on Training Your Nervous System for More Success
“An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.”-Mahatma Gandhi
… Small can sting
If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito. -Betty Reese
… A great demo, a bad product
Think about how people are going to actually use things. Don’t get caught up in the wow. Don’t confuse enthusiasm with priority.
… Scaling Oracle and PHP
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.
… Genius at Work
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.”
… Getting Real: Release something today
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.
… bash.org
XML is like violence, if it doesn’t solve the problem, just use more.
… Terry Chay’s OSCON talk defining Design Pattern
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it. - Justice Potter Stewart (on hardcore pornography)
… slashdot comment on Linus Says No to Specs
In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they are not.