“When I give a draft of an essay to friends, there are two things I want to know: which parts bore them, and which seem unconvincing. The boring bits can usually be fixed by cutting. But I don’t try to fix the unconvincing bits by arguing more cleverly. I need to talk the matter over.

“Creating an infrastructure for managing the content you wish you had doesn’t actually create that content.

“Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.

“Meeting the market’s demands is how application code becomes beautiful in a commercial sense.

“The hardest part about writing a search engine is that you’re going to process billions of URLS and serve millions, if not billions, of queries. This does not leave a lot of room for error. One super-linear algorithm applied over the wrong-sized list of items and you are sunk. One lock inside another lock and you are sunk. There will be no code paths not explored. All of those comments in your code, which print out errors like “This will never happen,” will happen.

“It’s the void pointer’s job to stand in for other pointer types. In ANSI C99, the “cast” is implied when you pointers to or from void-star, and redundant when supplied explicitly.

Yes, yes, I know, you can’t assign from void-star without a cast in C++. Stop using C++. And look askance at any pointer cast in straight C code.

“Composing state machines [functions, etc.] is superlinear in complexity for linear gains in expressive power. Composing interfaces expressed as channels^pdf is superlinear in expressive power for linear investments of design complexity. Interleaving channels is free. Compose interfaces, not state machines.

“Good leaders must be emotionally stable at deadlines. They cannot ever act panicky or lash out at team members without seriously harming the productivity of the team. They should be serious and positive; off-hand comments that insult people will be remembered, and I’ve seen repercussions happen after six months. Everything has a cost.

“There’s only so much extra space on a site, and there are simply too many “must have” widgets. It’s all gotta end sometime.

“CouchDB is still in alpha but I think the fundamentals are sound. It’s a lot more aligned with the way a modern web application works and needs its data represented. Its replication system is already much more powerful than that of other database systems and in fact is very similar to the way google works with its bigtable and map/reduce infrastructure.