If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.

It is widely grokked that cats have the hacker nature

When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.

The combination of threads, remote-procedure-call interfaces, and heavyweight object-oriented design is especially dangerous... if you are ever invited onto a project that is supposed to feature all three, fleeing in terror might well be an appropriate reaction.

The Wesnoth devs are good but not exceptionally so, and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++). Nevertheless our productivity, in terms of goals achieved per hour of work, is quite high.

The central problem of C and C++ is that they require programmers to do their own memory management

Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.