I think that a lot of programmers are ignoring an important point when people talk about reducing code repetition on large projects. Part of the idea is that large projects are intrinsically *wrong*. That you should be looking at making a number of smaller projects that are composable, even if you never end up reusing one of those smaller projects elsewhere. -- Dan Nugent

Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable. -- Ralph Johnson

Quality of the people is better than the quality of the business idea. Crappy people can screw up the best idea in the world. -- Hadi Partovi & Ali Partovi (iLike.com), Talk at StartupSchool2007

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

The best people and organizations have the attitude of wisdom: The courage to act on what they know right now and the humility to change course when they find better evidence. The quest for management magic and breakthrough ideas is overrated; being a master of the obvious is underrated. Jim Maloney is right: Work is an overrated activity -- Bob Sutton

Lisp programmers know the value of everything but the cost of nothing. -- Alan J. Perlis

Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears. –Les Brown

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life. –John Lennon

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. –Plato

We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained. –Marie Curie