I've known people who have not mastered their tools who are good programmers, but not a tool master who remained a mediocre programmer.

Responsible Development is the style of development I aspire to now. It can be summarized by answering the question, How would I develop if it were my money? I'm amazed how many theoretical arguments evaporate when faced with this question.

Responsible Development shares many practices with XP but the roots are different. Responsible Development's values are honesty, transparency, accountability and responsibility. These lead me to pairing, test-first, incremental design, continuous integration and so on because they support the values.

Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming; feedback is the treatment.

Sometimes the problem has to mature before the solution can mature.

The community isn't nearly as afraid as it thinks it is.

I mean, source code in files; how quaint, how seventies!