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Common programmer thought pattern: there are only three numbers: 0, 1, and n.

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
Thought
Programmer
Programmers
Pattern
Patterns
Numbers
Common
Three

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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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Something is usable if it behaves exactly as expected.
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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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Nothing works better than just improving your product.
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Design adds value faster than it adds cost.
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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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Life is a bit hard sometimes, and sometimes you have to step up and fight fights that you never signed up for.
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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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Good software, like wine, takes time.
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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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Listen to your customers, not your competitors.
Joel Spolsky
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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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People ridiculously overvalue aesthetics and beauty when evaluating products. It's one of the reasons iPods, and, for that matter, Keanu Reeves, are so successful.
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If you can't understand the spec for a new technology, don't worry: nobody else will understand it either, and the technology won't be that important.
Joel Spolsky
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If something seems possible, that's probably because someone is already doing it. When something seems that it can't possibly work, nobody tries it. Real innovation happens when someone tries anyway, overlooking an obvious flaw, and finds a way to make an idea work.
Joel Spolsky
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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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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.
Joel Spolsky
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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.
Joel Spolsky
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Writing code is not production, it's not always craftsmanship though it can be, it's design.
Joel Spolsky
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Last week I was listening to a podcast on Hanselminutes, with Robert Martin talking about the SOLID principles... They all sounded to me like extremely bureaucratic programming that came from the mind of somebody that has not written a lot of code, frankly.
Joel Spolsky