If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as *lines produced* but as *lines spent*. -- Edsger Dijkstra

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

We now come to the decisive step of mathematical abstraction: we forget about what the symbols stand for. ...[The mathematician] need not be idle; there are many operations which he may carry out with these symbols, without ever having to look at the things they stand for. -- Hermann Weyl, The Mathematical Way of Thinking

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

Side projects are less masturbatory than reading RSS, often more useful than MobileMe, more educational than the comments on Reddit, and usually more fun than listening to keynotes. -- Chris Wanstrath

If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as *lines produced* but as *lines spent*. -- Edsger Dijkstra

Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do. ~John R. Wooden

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. –Steve Jobs

The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same. ~Colin R. Davis

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. –Mark Twain