Quotes
Life
if we are going to ask them to spend their heartbeats on us, on our ideas, how can we be sure, far more sure than we are now, that they spend those heartbeats wisely?
— http://contentsmagazine.com/articles/10-timeframes/
It’s the most beautiful and breathtaking thing, to place yourself gently in the hands of another human that you respect and like, and ask for what you want: to be loved back, cherished, understood.
— https://medium.com/@meliss_hughes/starting-over-at-35-551b5e198657
But our dreams aren’t ridiculous. In fact, they aren’t really “dreams” at all. They are who we are
— https://medium.com/@meliss_hughes/starting-over-at-35-551b5e198657
Wake up early. Show up. Learn how to think. Be genuine, but appear nice. Use envy for motivation instead of destruction. Do what you say you’re going to do. Ensure balance in every area of your life. Confront repressed thoughts immediately. Surround yourself with people who are better than you (but remember the thing about envy). Work out every day. Be good at what you do. Make money doing what you love. Have good friends. Never settle.
— https://dcurt.is/do
See list of interesting points:
https://startuplife.quora.com/25-Things-Ive-Learned-About-Life
Tech & Programming
Regarding Rust:
It also gives you that warm feeling of "if it compiles, errors will come from the logic I wrote, not language quirks I forgot to pay attention to".
— https://bluxte.net/musings/2018/04/10/go-good-bad-ugly/
Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.
— Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review, via The Prime Directive
A simple rule I follow: Honor the coder and their code. The constraints they endured are not ours to know. Make it better if you can.
— https://twitter.com/WoodyZuill/status/612990179909853184
We still program like it's 1960 because there are powerful path dependencies that incentivise pretending your space age computing machine is actually an 80 character tty. We are trapped in a local maximum.
— http://lighttable.com/2014/05/16/pain-we-forgot
We're still screwed, my friends, because we've almost certainly defeated the prediction and optimization capabilities of our VM or our M, and we've permanently signed over performance in exchange for ease of implementation.
— http://blog.headius.com/2012/09/avoiding-hash-lookups-in-ruby.html?m=1
Anyone who thinks, like this fella does, that garbage collected virtual machines are always a good idea has never done serious numerics, data acquisition or real time work, which is half of what makes the world go around. Most people who consider themselves programmers are employed effectively selling underpants on the internet using LAMP. Therefore most people think that’s what programming is.
— https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/not-all-programmers-alike
At its core, the language is designed to eliminate bugs, but not in the academic way that, say, Haskell eliminates bugs by preventing normal people from writing code in it. Rather, it feels like it's designed to eliminate my bugs, today, without asking me to renounce my object-oriented ways and take up the white cloth of pure functions and start chanting the complete canon of category theory.
— http://www.evanmiller.org/swift-impressions.html
But it’s not for me at all. Not even for testing, experimenting, or curiosity. It feels too much like using a Windows PC, which was exactly Microsoft’s intention, and it will appeal to people who want that. But that’s a world I fled 8 years ago with no intention of returning.
— https://marco.org/2012/10/26/an-alternate-universe
One reason some people argue in favor of in-browser HTML/CSS/JavaScript web apps is that its the last bastion for write-once-run-everywhere. The lament I hear most frequently about mobile development is that if you want to reach the widest possible audience, you have to write at least two apps, iOS and Android. If you include Windows Phone, now you’re up to three. My take has always been: Tough luck. The point of making apps shouldn’t be about making life easier for developers, it’s about making the best possible apps for users. If you value user experience above developer convenience, it’s easy to see why native apps are winning the war.
— http://daringfireball.net/2014/11/googles_app_aesthetic
This is what I enjoy most: Building software. So I'll be damned if I stop doing that just because we've had enough success that I perhaps technically don't need to.”
— DHH http://m.slashdot.org/story/315605
Making & Shipping
Imagine the most beautiful scene ever. Now paint it. Now you understand why your "awesome idea for an app" is 1% of the work done.
— https://twitter.com/GordyPls/status/222624814412726272
If you don't build your dreams, someone will hire you to build theirs.
— https://twitter.com/mugunthkumar/statuses/221973908147011585
If you sit on, sleep on, stare at, or touch something for more than an hour a day, spend whatever it takes to get the best.
— https://twitter.com/marcoarment/statuses/13642753090
Here’s a great rule of thumb: until you create something yourself and then actually ship it, try to first find the positive in the products around you. Those products are the result of someone’s passion, hard work and innate genius.
— http://aaronmahnke.com/entitlement/
I had started to make an email program before in, probably, 1996,” he explains. “I had this idea I wanted to build web-based email. I worked on it for a couple of weeks and then got bored. One of the lessons I learned from that was just in terms of my own psychology, that it was important that I always have a working product. The first thing I do on day one is build something useful, then just keep improving it.
— Gmail’s creator, Paul Buchheit
What I am excited about is making things. If it wasn't obvious, the reason I have poured so much effort into The Incomparable over the past few years is that it's been a project I could actually make myself, rather than manging someone who manages someone who actually makes something, or negotiating with someone who works for someone who controls all the development resources that are required in order to create something.
— Jason Snell
who is the audience for your Glassboard and what problem do you solve for them?
— https://carpeaqua.com/2014/10/16/what-problem-are-you-solving
Do whatever you do intensely.
— Robert Henri
Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.
— Alexander Graham Bell
If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.
— unknown
It reminded me of a quote from Peter Drucker, in his 1960s book, “The Effective Executive”, talking about what happens when an organization grows:
An organization, a social artifact, is very different from a biological organism. Yet it stands under the law that governs the structure and size of animals and plants: The surface goes up with the square of the radius, but the mass grows with the cube. The larger the animal becomes, the more resources have to be devoted to the mass and to the internal tasks, to circulation and information, to the nervous system, and so on.
Business
...the market is set by masters trying to get away with paying the least possible, and workers trying to press for the maximum possible. An antagonistic struggle, surely.
It doesn’t need to be like that. Especially in software, which is a profitable business when run with restraint and sold to businesses.
— DHH