"Every great developer you know got there by solving problems they were unqualified to solve until they actually did it." - Patrick McKenzie

i remember the days when people still programmed in low-level languages such as untranspiled javascript

The more I do software, & read the old papers & new blogs, the more I realize that our history is this series, repeated ad infinitum:

The most daring thing to do with your life is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

Refinance your technical debt with a new layer of abstraction

I think my main problem with Linux is how it sympathizes the minds of our young people to the international communist cause.

it's incredible that in the span of a few yrs mozilla invented a PL and re-invented a modern browser with it, and apparently *succeeded*. hacking greenfield is one thing, but what they did with firefox is unprecedented

Alan Long-time Mozillian here. Nobody expected this exact outcome. From the inside it looks almost like luck—but it wasn't. The lessons I see are: - invest $$$$ in R&D a decade before you need it - hire PhDs - take on long-shot projects in parallel - retain your engineers

Alan - invest in dev tools & infrastructure - your product is MUCH better when your prioritize correctly Rust was not the only important piece. Improvements in profiling (perf measurement) played an equally important role.

"Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand." - Martin Fowler

This is likely my favorite and the most important quote about creating software, EVER!.