The engineer who got into software later in life wonders what their career would look like if they had started earlier.
Without requirements or design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
CEO and co-founder of Shopify on trying out the Ruby on Rails for the first time
everything under the sun
You can try to win a features arms race by offering everything under the sun. Or you can just focus on a couple of things and do ‘em really well and get people who really love those things to love your product. For little guys, that’s a smarter route. When you choose that path, you get clarity. Everything is simpler. It’s simpler to explain your product. It’s simpler for people to understand. It’s simpler to change it. It’s simpler to maintain it. It’s simpler to start using it. The ingredients are simpler. The packaging is simpler. Supporting it is simpler. The manual is simpler. Figuring out your message is simpler. And most importantly, succeeding is simpler.
How Chipotle, Pinkberry, and others win big by doing just a few things well
What people want
What people want is opinions, analysis, techniques, experiences, and insights. The best of all these come as a by-product from actually doing stuff. The closer you are to the topics, the more natural you’ll be able to extract the goodies.
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
the tale of the sea squirt
The sea quirt provides a cautionary tale – when it is born, it floats through the open oceans seeking a place to make its home. Once the sea quirt finds a solid piece of ocean floor to attach itself to, it does a peculiar thing. The sea squirt eats its brain. Having achieved its objective, a firm anchor within the ocean; it no longer needs its brain. You may know people like this. They have a firm anchor in life or at work and, apparently, have long since consumed their brains. Zoologists say that the sea squirt shares 80% of our DNA. Some people probably share more than that. The sea squirt is assuming that nothing is going to change in its environment and that it will no longer need to make significant adjustments. This may work for the sea squirt, but human beings can’t afford to follow suit.
Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake.