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Something is usable if it behaves exactly as expected.

Joel Spolsky

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Joel Spolsky
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: January 1
Businessperson
Chief Executive Officer
Computer Scientist
Programmer
Software Engineer
Albuquerque
New Mexico
Avram Joel Spolsky
Something
Usable
Behaves
Programming
Behave
Expected
Exactly

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Talk to your customers. Find out what they need. Don't pay any attention to the competition. They're not relevant to you.
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If your goals is to produce something of permanent value, you start to think differently about you want on the site.
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Listen to your customers, not your competitors.
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I've been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system - it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes.
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Software development takes immense intellectual effort. Even the best programmers can rarely sustain that level of effort for more than a few hours a day. Beyond that, they need to rest their brains a bit, which is why they always seem to be surfing the Internet or playing games when you barge in on them.
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Entrepreneurship boils down to the simple fact that a team of really smart people who can get things done are going to get smart, useful things done.
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Not having a schedule is OK if it's your PhD and you plan to spend 14 years on the thing, or if you're a programmer working on the next Duke Nukem and we'll ship when we're good and ready. But for almost any kind of real business, you just have to know how long things are going to take, because developing a product costs money.
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Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.
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The secret of Big Macs is that they're not very good, but every one is not very good in exactly the same way.
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So if you want to get things done, you positively have to understand at any given point in time what is the most important thing to get done right now and if you're not doing it, you're not making progress at the fastest possible rate.
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An idea isn't worth that much. It's the execution of the idea that has value. If you can't convince one other person that this is something to devote your life to, then it's not worth it.
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Good software, like wine, takes time.
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Never put yourself in a position that will put yourself at risk if you make the wrong decision. We spent cash on everything. It's fashionable to make 'bet the company' decisions, but don't do it.
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That's another flaw with performance-based rewards: They are easy for one of your competitors to top.
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There's a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. [...] The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It's harder to read code than to write it.
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Beware of Methodologies. They are a great way to bring everyone up to a dismal, but passable, level of performance, but at the same time, they are aggravating to more talented people who chafe at the restrictions that are placed on them.
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Writing code is not production, it's not always craftsmanship though it can be, it's design.
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Common programmer thought pattern: there are only three numbers: 0, 1, and n.
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Remember, just because Microsoft can do something, doesn't mean you can. Microsoft makes their own gravity. Normal rules don't apply to them.
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Design adds value faster than it adds cost.
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