joshuago’s Bookmarks

Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place.

We have to make the case for free enterprise and economic growth from a moral perspective, using language about opportunity and happiness and living a meaningful life. We have to explain how the pursuit of happiness requires the opportunity to earn our success, and how earned success comes only when we succeed on our own terms.

Software developers should recognize that they're in a privileged position. We should aim to use our power to better the world and solve hard problems rather than simply building things for ourselves.

Who cares if your product is the most powerful thing in the world if no one understands how to use it? Don't just dump developers to a GitHub page with a two-liner readme. The most successful API docs are carefully crafted with love.

A method to visualize binary files with unknown content to facilitate broad pattern-finding by eye.

Why would someone spend their money with you — so what is unique about you? Why would somebody work for you? Why would society allow you to operate in their defined geography — their country? And why would somebody invest their money with you?

Hustling doing whatever you have to do, for however long as you have to do it, until you reach your goal. The world belongs to those who hustle, and the world needs hustlers.

Don't be afraid of big companies entering your market. You can move more quickly than they can. Besides, you also have the option of allying yourself with another big company. Don't get into price wars or an arms race on number of features. See what you can do to bring your users traffic and your partners money.

The value of a problem directly correlates to the time people will take to tell you about it.

The first step is fully admitting that the code you write is riddled with errors. That is a bitter pill to swallow for a lot of people, but without it, most suggestions for change will be viewed with irritation or outright hostility. You have to want criticism of your code.