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

There's a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. [...] The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It's harder to read code than to write it.

Good software, like wine, takes time.

Life is a bit hard sometimes, and sometimes you have to step up and fight fights that you never signed up for.

The secret of Big Macs is that they're not very good, but every one is not very good in exactly the same way.

Software development takes immense intellectual effort. Even the best programmers can rarely sustain that level of effort for more than a few hours a day. Beyond that, they need to rest their brains a bit, which is why they always seem to be surfing the Internet or playing games when you barge in on them.

If you are a programmer working in 2006 and you don’t know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I’m going to punish you by making you peel onions for six months in a submarine.