Stuff I Like

"I believe in this concept so completely that I’ll take the importance of writing a step further: I find it valuable to write even if only for my own benefit. Writing is a linear process that forces a tangle of loose connections in your brain through a narrow aperture exposing them to much greater scrutiny. In my experience, discussion expands the space of possibilities while writing reduces it to its most essential components."

"Every programmer occasionally, when nobody’s home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It’s a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world."

"And no matter what, you might still hire a dud. You might hire a polymath who solves all your problems for three months then gets bored and sucks payroll for the rest of the year. You might hire a coke head who spouts seven-digit primes in his blackouts but corners your interns for hours trying to convince them that Yes was the end of artistic achievement. There’s no perfect way to hire anyone for anything, but the programming world should stop pretending that it’s full of perfectly competent geniuses with a genetic predisposition for identifying other perfectly competent geniuses with their special sauce questions."

"The other day a programmer at my work hacked on some PHP that I had written and, when I pulled the changes, I saw my code was now riddled with mixed indenting. I felt like he had just been in my bedroom and knocked all my transformers off the shelf and then just left them there. On the floor! That FUCK! I was going through Rapid Cyclic Weapon Escalation Syndrome¹ and was in danger of rage-crapping my pants when I was reminded of that old bible story from primary school..."