Philosophy

        This is the page where I intend to put in as much good thinking as I can find. That being the case, I don't expect it to ever be complete. I'm sure I don't have the monopoly on good thinking ;)

• Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
• Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
• ``Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.'' (Fred Brooks, ``The Mythical Man-Month'', Chapter 11).
• ``If you plan to throw one away, you will throw away two.''
• If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
• When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
• Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
• Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
• Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
• Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
• If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
• The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
• Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
• Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
• Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
• When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible -- and *never* throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!
• When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
• A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
• To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
• the `SNAFU Principle': ``True communication is possible only between equals, because inferiors are more consistently rewarded for telling their superiors pleasant lies than for telling the truth.''
• ``The means determine the ends'', or even ``Process becomes product''
• The principle of shared understanding. It increases productivity.
• Provided the development coordinator has a medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

Each day in life is training
Training for myself
Though failure is possible
Living for each moment
Equal to anything
Ready for anything

I am alive
I am this moment
My future is here and now

For if I cannot endure today
When and where will I?
Soen Ozeki
Daisen-in Temple, Kyoto

• I never forget a face, but in your case I will make an exception Groucho Marx
• In the most carefully constructed experiment under the most carefully controlled conditions, the organism will do whatever it damn well pleases.
• Be prepared, be smart or be lucky.
• You always win by running away Justy Ueki Tylor
• If you are going to talk rubbish, expect pain Arnold J.Rimmer
• The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.Thomas B. Macaulay
• Defeat shows that victory is possible.
• If you don't have time to do it right, will you have time to do it over?
• "The harder I work, the luckier I get"--Thomas Jefferson.
• Confidence comes not from always being right, but from not fearing to be wrong.
• "There is little room left for wisdom when one is full of judgement"--Malcolm Hein
• "Sight is a faculty.  Seeing is an art."--George Perkins Marsh
• "Finally, no more overcrowded servers filled with out of character player killers who spam links to porn sites after looting your corpse."--Thor "Sexypants" Antrim
• "Better then he who knows what is right, is the one who loves what is right"--Confucious