Have you ever noticed that when you sit down to write something, half the ideas that end up in it are ones you thought of while writing it? The same thing happens with software. Working to implement one idea gives you more ideas. -- Paul Graham, The other road ahead.

Abstraction is a form of data compression: absolutely necessary, because human short-term memory is so small, but the critically important aspect of abstraction is the algorithm that gets you from the name back to the "uncompressed" details. -- Bruce Wilder (blog post comment)

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

Good ideas are out there for anyone with the wit and the will to find them. -- Malcolm Gladwell, Who says big ideas are rare?

An interpreter raises the machine to the level of the user program; a compiler lowers the user program to the level of the machine language. -- SICP

Some may say Ruby is a bad rip-off of Lisp or Smalltalk, and I admit that. But it is nicer to ordinary people. -- Matz, LL2

When you stop chasing the wrong things you give the right things a chance to catch you. ~Lolly Daskal

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. –Martin Luther King Jr.

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

Trust because you are willing to accept the risk, not because it’s safe or certain. ~Anonymous