“Every page made by our software was generated by a program written in Rtml. We called these programs templates to make them less frightening, but they were real programs. In fact, they were Lisp programs. Users could write their own Rtml templates to describe what they wanted their pages to look like. We had a structure editor for manipulating these templates, a lot like the structure editor they had in Interlisp. Instead of typing free-form text, you cut and pasted bits of code together. This meant that it was impossible to get syntax errors. It also meant that we didn’t have to display the parentheses in the underlying s-expressions: we could show structure by indentation. By this means we made the language look a lot less threatening.

“If you build your own business on top of an API, you need a contractual relationship to ensure the service doesn’t get taken away from you. These generally cost money. The provider of your API will find it easier to implement services on top of their API than you will. Therefore you have to add something of your own that’s difficult to replicate..

“I went with the cheap cinder blocks in my garage edition, and now my place is crawling with Shi’as.

“I’ve met programmers working on interesting things who clearly think I should be more excited about the projects they’re working on than I am.. There is just nothing happening on the Web today that is anywhere near as exciting as the experience of telling people that there’s this thing called the World-Wide Web and it’s awesome and you should totally get into it.

“Am I an aspiring actor? Am I a programmer? I’m a science fiction screenwriter who does way too much research. What’s the best way to find out what changes are really going to happen? Simple. Bet your ability to eat, for several years running, on which technologies you learn. After a while you get a pretty good intuition for that kind of thing. And likewise - the best way to write a screenplay? Learn to act!

“..programming is looking more and more like acting or screenwriting every day. Passion is necessary. The entry costs are approaching zero and the value of education is only partial. ..”you’re only as good as your latest hit”.. Every programmer should balance programming for money with programming for programming.

“Your employer is more important than the community.. Open source developers are no more virtuous than corporate developers. While you may program for fun and the satisfaction of a job well done, the choice of project you work on is inherently a selfish one. Always. ..a company has a reality check that can’t be ignored because sooner or later they’re going to have to go out there and prove themselves in the marketplace.

“The community is more important than your employer.

“Outsiders are not respected by the kernel community. This means we miss a lot.

“Digg.com is really lucky in that 98% of the time the database is accessed, it is being read.. Most people come to Digg’s front page, read it and leave, which is kind of nice..