Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams. -- Mary Ellen Kelly

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

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

The hardest part of design ... is keeping features out. -- Donald Norman

Be the change you want to see in the world. -- Mahatma Gandhi

Never do the impossible. People will expect you to do it forever after. -- pigsandfishes.com

A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him. ~David Brinkley

If you do what you always did, you will get what you always got. ~Anonymous

There are no traffic jams along the extra mile. –Roger Staubach

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time. ~George Bernard Shaw