We are the sum of our behaviours; excellence therefore is not an act but a habit. -- Aristotle.

There really is no learning without doing. -- Roger Schank, Engines for Education

While I’ve always appreciated beautiful code, I share Jonathan’s concern about studying it too much. I think studying beauty in music and painting has led us to modern classical music and painting that the majority of us just don’t get. Beauty can be seen when it emerges, but isn’t something to strive for in isolation of a larger context. In the software world, the larger context would be the utility of the software to the end user. -- [A comment on a blog]

Something Confusing about "Hard": It's tempting to think that if it's hard, then it's valuable. Most valuable things are hard. Most hard things are completely useless -- (picture of someone smashing their head through concrete blocks kung-fu style). Hard DOES NOT EQUATE TO BEING valuable. Remember Friendster back in the day? You'd sign in, invite friends, have 25 friends, go to their profile, and then it'd show how you were connected to each one. That's an impressive [some geeky CS jargon] Cone traversal of a tree - 100 million string comparisons per page -- it won't scale. Used to take a minute per page to load, and Friendster died a painful death. MySpace -- not interested in solving problems They use the shortcut of "Miss Fitzpatrick is in your extended network" (i.e. even when you're not even signed up for MySpace) They didn't solve the hard problem. But they make the more relevant assumption that you want to be connected to hot women. [LOL] Shows Alexa graph showing that in early 2005 Myspace took off, and quickly bypassed Friendster and never looked back. -- Max Levchin, PayPal founder, Talk at StartupSchool2007

Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones. -- Alan J. Perlis (Epigrams in programming)

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. -- Albert Einstein

Fall seven times and stand up eight. –Japanese Proverb

People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing - that’s why we recommend it daily. ~Zig Ziglar

Certain things catch your eye, but pursue only those that capture the heart. – Ancient Indian Proverb

Dream big and dare to fail. –Norman Vaughan