Remember that in 1993 a company with a bad Web site needed an engineer. Today, a company with a bad Web site needs a psychiatrist.

Even within traditional universities there has always been debate about whether it wouldn't be better to focus on only one course at a time.

Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

Start by putting yourself in your users' shoes. Why are they coming to your site? If you look at most Web sites, you'd presume that the answer is "User is extremely bored and wishes to stare at a blank screen for several minutes while a flashing icon loads, then stare at the flashing icon for a few more minutes."

Although the Buddhists will tell you that desire is the root of suffering, my personal experience leads me to point the finger at system administration.

SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing.

If I'd had more time or been a better writer, I would have tried to put the same ideas and experiences into a novel. But I didn't so I slapped it up on the Web.