Things to keep in mind
- Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
- Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
- "Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow." (Fred Brooks, "The Mythical Man-Month" , Chapter 11).
- If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
- When you lose interest in a program, your last duty is to hand it off to a competent successor.
- Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
- Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
- Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone. "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" - Linus's Law.
- Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around. "Show me your flowchart [code] and conceal your tables [data structures], and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables [data structures], and I won't usually need to see your flowchart [code]; it'll be obvious" - Brooks, Chapter 9.
- If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
- The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
- Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
- "Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (who was an aviator and aircraft designer when he wasn't authoring classic children's books).
- Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
- When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible - and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!
- When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
- A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
- To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
- Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.
