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Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
Hindsight is an exact science.
Inside every well-written large program is a well-written small program.
The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late.
Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.
Instead of baby showers, let's host business showers. When a friend starts a business, we all come together, congratulate them and bring resources for the business.
You can always feel when product/market fit is not happening. The customers aren't quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn't spreading, usage isn't growing that fast, press reviews are kind of ‘blah,’ the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close. And you can always feel product/market fit when it is happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You're hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they've heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. You start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from Harvard Business School. Investment bankers are staking out your house.
People who preach software design as a disciplined activity spend considerable energy making us all feel guilty. We can never be structured enough or object-oriented enough to achieve nirvana in this lifetime. We all truck around a kind of original sin from having learned Basic at an impressionable age. But my bet is that most of us are better designers than the purists will ever acknowledge.
The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.
Kernighan and Ritchie
