Training and marketing as taxes
“Training is a tax you pay for a lousy hiring environment…Marketing is a tax you pay for being unremarkable.”
-Robert Stephens of Geek Squad in A Geek’s Guide to Great Service

Complex UIs
“Why do software designers want their work to appear more complex instead of less? I just don’t get why they don’t get it.”
-David Pogue in It’s the Software, Not You

Choosing between safety and risk
“Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth): Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.”
—Abraham Maslow on 8 Ways to Self-Actualize

Launch quickly
“One reason to launch quickly is that it forces you to actually finish some quantum of work. Nothing is truly finished till it’s released; you can see that from the rush of work that’s always involved in releasing anything, no matter how finished you thought it was. The other reason you need to launch is that it’s only by bouncing your idea off users that you fully understand it.”
-Paul Graham in The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups

Design languages that can grow
“The main thing Guy Steele asks during the lecture is ‘If I want to help other persons to write all sorts of programs, should I design a small programming language or a large one?’ He answers that he should build neither a small, nor a big language. He needs to design a language that can grow. A main goal in designing a language should be to plan for growth. The language must start small, and the language must grow as the set of users grows.”
From Growing a Language by Guy Steele [good coders code, great reuse]

Software stays healthy
“It can be hard for a business to stay ahead if its technology is falling behind. That is one reason that despite an uncertain economy, worldwide information technology spending is on track to reach $3.4 trillion in 2008 — an 8 percent increase over 2007, according to the research firm Gartner. Of all spending categories, software and services are set to show the healthiest growth — with projected increases of around 10 percent each.”
From In a Downturn, but Still Spending on Technology [NY Times]

Chicago-style software
“There’s the dot-com, Silicon Valley, blow-all-your-money-on-booze style. Then there’s the Chicago thing: Do something, do it well and be modest about it.”
-Adrian Holovaty from EveryBlock.com in Cyberstar [Chicago Tribune]

Get on with it
“Test just enough to know what your gear can do, and then get on with real photography.”
-Ken Rockwell in The Seven Levels of Photographers

Deleting code
“Abandoning a speculative peice of functionality just allowed me to delete 2/3 of this module’s code. I got all 37signals on its ass.”
-Mike McCaffrey