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Eventually working around high-productivity professionals like John Carmack made me realize that if you want to excel, then you have to work hard and focus the whole time. I remember Carmack talking about productivity measurement. While working he would play a CD, and if he was not being productive, he’d pause the CD player. This meant any time someone came into his office to ask him a question or he checked email he’d pause the CD player. He’d then measure his output for the day by how many times he played the CD (or something like that – maybe it was how far he got down into his CD stack). I distinctly remember him saying “So if I get up to go to the bathroom, I pause the player”. ...

We did what we always do when there’s a problem without a clear solution: we waited. from “Toward Go 2”

In 1996 Keith Shafer and several others proposed a solution to the problem of broken URLs. The link to this solution is now broken. Roy Fielding posted an implementation suggestion in July of 1995. The link is now broken. src

…making positive outcomes the easiest and default approach creates positive feedback loops src via this tweet

PowerPoint is just simulated acetate overhead slides, and to me, that is a kind of a moral crime. Alan Kay, src

This book is dedicated, in respect and admiration, to the spirit that lives in the computer. I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don’t become missionaries. Don’t feel as if you’re Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more. ...

Good software is approachable. It can be understood completely in independent, easy pieces. You don’t need to understand everything before you can understand anything. Good software is consistent. It lets you take what you’ve learned about one part and extrapolate it to the rest. It doesn’t self-contradict. It is parsimonious, avoiding superfluous elements. Good software explains itself. It has affordances for learning and discovery. It is role-expressive and minimizes hidden magic. ...

It has been extensively documented that programmers are willing to put in long hours of effort in order to save ten minutes of “unnecessary” labor. This is known as optimization. src Working on an open-source contribution

It’s strictly an 8-to-5 kind of place — there are late nights, but they’re the exception. The programmers are intense, but low-key. Many of them have put in years of work either for IBM (which owned the shuttle group until 1994), or directly on the shuttle software. They’re adults, with spouses and kids and lives beyond their remarkable software program. That’s the culture: the on-board shuttle group produces grown-up software, and the way they do it is by being grown-ups. It may not be sexy, it may not be a coding ego-trip — but it is the future of software. When you’re ready to take the next step — when you have to write perfect software instead of software that’s just good enough — then it’s time to grow up. ...

Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand. src