Favorite Programming Quotes 2010

It took me some twenty-plus years to really learn how to program.
DHH

Before you know it, you’re half-way done with your idea and you’ve accidentally learned how to do it too. In short, you start with little bit of something real and make it tick. Then you make it tock.
DHH

Facebook has been around for seven years. It has 500 million users. If you can’t figure out how to make money off half a billion people in seven years, I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’re unlikely to ever do.
DHH

A fool and his money will soon be departed applies equally to venture capitalists as it does to everyone else.
DHH

The most important technique, the most important competitive advantage we have at 37Signals is good human writing.
DHH

Planning is not just guessing, it is harmful guessing, because it is a waste of time. All the time you spend doing your five year plan you can use to worry about tomorrow.
DHH

Fear is ugly because it makes you irrational. Fear makes you jump to conclusions. Fear makes you reactionary.
DHH

The first and most important thing about a product is making it easy to use and easy to get value right “out of the box.”
Fred Wilson

Our most interesting profits will come from capitalizing on huge opportunities, not from micromanaging costs. 
Philip Su

What would you do if you hit the lottery?  How can you do some of that right now?
Philip Su

Don’t fear process.  Fear bad people dictating process.  Fear process trying to make up for bad people.
Philip Su

Jobs don’t scale. Whatever you do on your job, it will never bring you 4x or 8x or more money. Switching jobs might help, but I guess you will agree there’s a limit.
Roman Snitko

Programmers aren’t born, they’re compiled.
deadapostle

Advertising is mind pollution.
John Leach

Google Buzz is the new bright shiny spinning object destined to destroy my productivity. I don’t need any more of those. That’s the difference between Microsoft and Google in destroying productivity of able and willing people: Google uses carrots, Microsoft uses sticks.
Randal L. Schwartz

Every time an engineer joins Google, a startup dies.
Chris Dixon

There is no movement without the first follower. See, we are told that we all need to be leaders but that would be ineffective. The best way to make a movement, if you really care, is to courageously follow and show others how to follow.
Derek Siver

Google is a threat to everybody in the web space, to some extent. I supposed anyone can dream up some sort of a nightmare scenario where the whole might of Google pursues you as a individual business and it is game over but every entrepreneur lives under that threat.
Alex Algard

Hate marketing is a very strong and powerful thing, especially in the internet, You can try as much as you want to get positive press but negative press is so much easier and so much more viral.
Timothy Sykes

If I could make the same amount of money but wake up until when I can’t hold in my pee any longer, I will be a success.
Phil Kaplan

When you have a company name that is to descriptive about what you do, you don’t stand out.
Phil Kaplan

Don’t turn on monitization, typically, until it’s going to be significant.
Phil Kaplan

The answer to the question “where do good ideas come from” is always the same, the come from bad ideas. If you come up with 20 bad ideas you get one good one.
Seth Godin

So this engineer is converting the site from one that runs on a scripted language to one that runs on a compiled language. However, if you went to go talk to him about basketball, you would probably have the most awkward conversation you’d have with a human being in your entire life. You just can’t talk to these people on a normal level. If you wanted to talk about basketball, talk about graph theory.
Anonymous Facebook Engineer

Lawyers can’t tell you you can’t do something. They can warn you about risks, and in extreme cases tell you that something is such a bad idea you’ll need to get someone other than them to do it but the judgment call of whether the risk is worth it is the entrepreneur’s.
Bram Cohen

From pitch perspective, the more you wear your idea, the more it fits you and your comfortable with it, the easier it is for somebody like me to say tell me more.
Brad Feld

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
Steve Jobs

Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales.
Larry Ellison

The next time someone asks us for a favor, we’re less likely to do it given how this turned out. Hopefully, if you’re the one asking, you’ll understand. I want to help you, really, but you may just be too stupid to accept it without threatening to sue me later. You’ll understand, I’m sure. Right?
Michael Arrington

I try to shrug it off as a minor annoyance that whenever I do something successful, every capitalist out there wants a piece of the action.
Mark Zuckerberg

Every application will be designed from the ground up to use real identity and friends.
Mark Zuckerberg

We are working hard to build a service that everyone, everywhere can use, whether they are a person, a company, a president or an organisation working for change
Mark Zuckerberg

By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?
Steve Jobs

The iPad makes using a computer less of a commitment and that has important implications for the way I compute.
Fred Wilson

A good enough first version will take longer to produce with $170K than it would have with $0K.
Jason Fried

You want attention after you’re good, not before. Obscurity is your friend when you’re just starting — especially when you don’t even have a product yet.
Jason Fried

[I]n the history of computing, we know that its not the number of apps that make a platform, but the existence of “killer apps.” Whether it was VisiCalc, or Lotus 123, or PageMaker, or Microsoft Office, the truth is users don’t really want hundreds of apps, they want one or a small number that are really meaningful.
Hank Williams

Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
Edward V Berard

Linux is only free if your time has no value
Jamie Zawinski

The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it’s too late.”
Seymour Cray