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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.

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
Going
Entrepreneurship
Really
Useful
Things
Smart
People
Team
Simple
Fact
Facts
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Something is usable if it behaves exactly as expected.
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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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That's another flaw with performance-based rewards: They are easy for one of your competitors to top.
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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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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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Common programmer thought pattern: there are only three numbers: 0, 1, and n.
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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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Good software, like wine, takes time.
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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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Listen to your customers, not your competitors.
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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 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.
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Nothing works better than just improving your product.
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Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.
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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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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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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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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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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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Design adds value faster than it adds cost.
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