| i have no special talents. i am only passionately curious. |
| i'd have written a shorter letter if i'd had more time. |
| what i cannot create, i do not understand. |
| if it's easy to explain, it might be a good idea. |
| study hard what interests you in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible. |
| i'm just trying to program without going crazy. |
| the goal is short term velocity without long term paralysis. |
| abstraction trades actual complexity for perceived complexity. |
| duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction. |
| no single data layout is efficient for all workloads. |
| programmers know the benefits of everything and the cost of nothing. |
| simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. |
| make the problem easy, then solve the easy problem. |
| nullius in verba. |
| do what you can, with what you have, where you are. |
| one accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions. |
| brevity is the soul of wit. |
| creativity is the residue of time wasted. |
| amateurs talk about tactics. professionals study logistics. |
| simplicity requires hard work to achieve and education to appreciate. to make matters worse, complexity sells better. |
| some teams have a manager, others have a leader. |
| talk is cheap. show me the code. |
| when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. so create. |
| the amount of ceremony required is inversely proportional to trust. |
| do not abstract before an abstraction is necessary. |
| only trust the network at the physical layer that it won't destroy your hardware. |
| if you want to do great work, you need freedom first. |
| not all broken windows are worth fixing. |
| the good stuff is often not what we plan before we start. it's what we find along the way. |
| network boundaries are enforced by physics. module boundaries are enforced by discipline. |
| a question matters if its answer will impact future action. |
| the difference between hope and despair is a good night's sleep. |
| brevity is the soul of wit. |
| creativity is the residue of time wasted. |
| the challenge with teams is avoiding the dilution of responsibility. |
| it's hard to drive non-incremental innovation without a benevolent dictator model. |
| the difference between under-engineering and over-engineering is that you can fix under-engineering. |
| the purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise. |