Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Another common trick is to start by considering new work to be of a different, less exacting type. To start a painting saying that it's just a sketch, or a new piece of software saying that it's just a quick hack. Then you judge your initial results by a lower standard. Once the project is rolling you can sneakily convert it to something more.
Paul Graham • Early Work
Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot. The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And
Paul Graham • Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
When you try to do 100 percent of what somebody wants, you need a perfect match, and it's pretty rare that you have a perfect match between what you thought people needed and what they actually need. If you just try instead to do 80 percent of what they need, there's a pretty good chance that you'll hit a sweet spot. So Rails is really about trying
... See moreJessica Livingston • Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
But even so I'd advise startups to pull a Meraki initially if they can.Like paying excessive attention to early customers, fabricating things yourself turns out to be valuable for hardware startups. You can tweak the design faster when you're the factory, and you learn things you'd never have known otherwise.
Paul Graham • Do Things that Don't Scale
One way to do it is to study the histories of people who've done great work.
Paul Graham • Early Work
I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as counterintuitive as startup investing.
Paul Graham • Black Swan Farming
The World Wide Web is what I know best (I’ve coded for money in the programming languages Java, JavaScript, Python, Perl, PHP, Clojure, and XSLT), but the Web is only one small part of the larger world of software development. There are 11 million professional software developers on earth, according to the research firm IDC. (An additional 7 millio... See more
Paul Ford • Paul Ford: What Is Code? | Bloomberg
But the choice of a main programming language is the most important signaling behavior that a technology company can engage in. Tell me that you program in Java, and I believe you to be either serious or boring. In Ruby, and you are interested in building things quickly. In Clojure, and I think you are smart but wonder if you ship. In Python, and I... See more
Paul Ford • Paul Ford: What Is Code? | Bloomberg
Be Good
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