The average MIT graduate wants to work at Google or Microsoft, because it’s a recognized brand, it’s safe, and they’ll get paid a good salary right away. It’s the job equivalent of the pizza they had for lunch. The drawbacks will only become apparent later, and then only in a vague sense of malaise.
– Paul Graham.
technology
Furniture
I’ve been building custom furniture for my house on almost every evening for the last two weeks. I can’t express the kind of satisfaction of building something so heavy you can’t lift it. Much better than, say, writing software.
The Master Programmer moves from program to program without fear. No change in management can harm him. He will not be fired, even if the project is cancelled. Why is this? He is filled with Tao.
The Tao of Programming
Bad Apples
One thing I’m consistently doing at the workplace is weeding out bad apples. If someone doesn’t ship, poisons the atmosphere, doesn’t want to cooperate or is incompetent and overconfident, they’re dead in my eyes. I don’t destroy people – I just make sure they work somewhere else.
There’s a brighter side of this. If someone ships, is willing to learn, and is generally awesome, I’ll defend them with my bare hands if needs be. It’s a battlefield loyalty: if you’re a real soldier, we’ll march together to victory; but if you constantly slack off on your duty, all you’ll get from me is a prompt bullet in the head.
Sorry, nothing personal. Business is business.
PS. As you can probably guess, I’m permanently unfit for corporate jobs. ;)
chomp($_);
Another glorious workhack discovered: chomp off the end of a Friday, leave at 3PM, catch the bus towards my parents’ summer house, and work on the road. That’s over 3 hours of pure uninterrupted productivity, AND my weekend starts much earlier.
Bugs
The summer break is over. The pile of bugs waiting is huge. Time to kick some asses.
There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. – Charles Anthony Richard Hoare.
Set Compilers To Kill
New way to improve your work efficiency: look so pissed off no one feels brave or foolish enough to even talk to you. == distraction-free environment.
Mondays
Our frontend developer put some salt in my coffee. Yuck.
The inspiration is long gone. I’m all NO CARRIER today.
Hacker Ideals
Our entire summer house has been transformed into a giant bedroom this evening due to the sheer number of guests that arrived today. They want to sleep, I want to code, and my muse is mad at me for some reason – so she sent me inspiration in the middle of the night.
Believe me or not, but right now I’m sitting in the bathroom, in the dark, cranking out C code on my laptop. It’s the only place in the whole house where I can sit without disturbing anyone’s sleep.