rule #1 of being awesome: know thy tools.

 

Find meaning in what you’re doing. Work to improve your industry. Get joy from making a customer’s day. Surround yourself with the kinds of people and environment that keep you engaged. Figure out the details and day-to-day process that keep you stimulated. Focus on how you execute and making continual improvements. Get off on how you sell, not what you sell.

It might not be the romantic ideal of “passion.” But if it provides you with sustainable joy and profit that you can count on, you’ll still be way ahead of the curve (and have extra resources and free time to spend doing whatever you want).

 

Double spacing,^[8] or placing two spaces between sentences (sometimes referred to as English spacing), came into widespread use with the introduction of the typewriter in the late 19th century.^[9] It was felt that with the monospaced font used by a typewriter, "a single word space ... was not wide enough to create a sufficient space between sentences"^[10] and that extra space might help signal the end of a sentence.^[11] This caused a widespread change in practice. From the late 19th century, printers were told to ignore their typesetting manuals in favor of typewriter spacing; Monotype and Linotype operators used double sentence spacing^[11] and this was widely taught in typing classes.^[12]

With the introduction of proportional fonts in computers, double sentence spacing became obsolete, according to many experts.^[13] These proportional fonts now assign appropriate horizontal space to each character (including punctuation marks), and can modify kerning values to adjust spaces following terminal punctuation, so there is less need to manually increase spacing between sentences.^[10] From around 1950, single sentence spacing became standard in books, magazines and newspapers.^[14] Regardless, many still believe that double spaces are correct.

 

The importance of eating together with your co-workers is not negotiable, to me. It’s too important to be left to chance. That’s why we eat together at long tables, not a bunch of little round tables. That’s why when new people start work at the company, they’re not allowed to sit off by themselves in a corner. When we have visitors, they eat together with everyone else.

 

The question is whether a trillion dollars is the right amount for individuals to spend marketing themselves. What would happen if people spent it building up a work history instead? On becoming smarter, more flexible, more self-sufficient and yes, able to take more risk because they owe less money...

There's no doubt that we need smarter and more motivated people in our organizations. I'm not sure we need them to be better labeled or more accredited.

 

under the pretense that we were empowering employees by letting them work on things they wanted to do. In reality, we were often stepping back just enough to been seen out of the eye's periphery, often jumping back in without warning when things weren't following unsaid directions....

 

The fact that this code works, let alone that the project is a success, is close to the final proof that God doesn’t exist for the whole craftsmanship debate.

A step description should never contain regexen, CSS or XPath selectors, any kind of code or data structure. It should be easily understood just by reading the description.

 

The three biggest assets of the company weren't tested, because they couldn't be.

Sure, go ahead and test what's testable. But the real victories come when you have the guts to launch the untestable.

 

It starts out with a quote from Richard Stallman: "Craft means making useful objects with perhaps decorative touches. Fine art means making things purely for their beauty." Of course if you conflate the two things then Software Craftsmanship must seem like mere self-indulgence at the customer's expense.