Indeed one of the best ways to deflect attacks is to make it look like they're succeeding. It's the software equivalent of playing dead.

Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.

Talk to your customers. Find out what they need. Don't pay any attention to the competition. They're not relevant to you.

Last week I was listening to a podcast on Hanselminutes, with Robert Martin talking about the SOLID principles... They all sounded to me like extremely bureaucratic programming that came from the mind of somebody that has not written a lot of code, frankly.

If you can't understand the spec for a new technology, don't worry: nobody else will understand it either, and the technology won't be that important.

If your goals is to produce something of permanent value, you start to think differently about you want on the site.

It's harder to read code than to write it.