The wonderful and frustrating thing about understanding yourself is that nobody can do it for you. -- BetterExplained.com

The only problems we can really solve in a satisfactory manner are those that finally admit a nicely factored solution. -- E. W. Dijkstra, The humble programmer

Rules of Optimization: Rule 1: Don’t do it. Rule 2 (for experts only): Don’t do it yet. -- M.A. Jackson

Functional programming is like describing your problem to a mathematician. Imperative programming is like giving instructions to an idiot. -- arcus, #scheme on Freenode

Something Confusing about "Hard": It's tempting to think that if it's hard, then it's valuable. Most valuable things are hard. Most hard things are completely useless -- (picture of someone smashing their head through concrete blocks kung-fu style). Hard DOES NOT EQUATE TO BEING valuable. Remember Friendster back in the day? You'd sign in, invite friends, have 25 friends, go to their profile, and then it'd show how you were connected to each one. That's an impressive [some geeky CS jargon] Cone traversal of a tree - 100 million string comparisons per page -- it won't scale. Used to take a minute per page to load, and Friendster died a painful death. MySpace -- not interested in solving problems They use the shortcut of "Miss Fitzpatrick is in your extended network" (i.e. even when you're not even signed up for MySpace) They didn't solve the hard problem. But they make the more relevant assumption that you want to be connected to hot women. [LOL] Shows Alexa graph showing that in early 2005 Myspace took off, and quickly bypassed Friendster and never looked back. -- Max Levchin, PayPal founder, Talk at StartupSchool2007

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it. -- Alan J. Perlis (Epigrams in programming)

Subscribe to The Morning Email.

Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter. ~Francis Chan

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor. ~Truman Capote

If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced. –Vincent Van Gogh