“You can’t control the number of items on your todo list, but you can control the language and level of detail you use. The language controls the number of items.

“Eliminating waste should be the goal, not efficiency. Running at 100% efficiency leads to waste. If you don’t have slack, you increase your cycle time and the system ends up sub-optimal.

“It’s always a hustle, whether you have $25 or $25,000. When you’re ahead of the game, you can either make the decisions to take your business to the next level OR you can squander your money to country club memberships and expensive trips.

“It seems that in public discourse, he who makes the first logical assertion based on any data at all has the high ground. McCain says Obama plans to raise taxes (data) and that raising taxes during tough economic times is bad because Herbert Hoover did it (logic) therefore Obama’s tax plan is bad for the economy. Obama doesn’t come back with any arguments that raising taxes isn’t necessarily bad for the economy. Instead he just shows different data, namely that 95% of people will get a tax cut.

“Companies finance themselves using a pecking order: retained earnings first, then debt, and finally, as a last resort, equity. Equity is the costliest form of finance. Managers can’t often communicate information to shareholders efficiently or credibly; managers have to bear the costs of negotiating and bargaining with shareholders; and shareholders constantly have to monitor managers, and search for better-performing equities. Debt can add value to a company, but equity rarely can.

“In hard times the motivations of VCs become more closely aligned with those of the founders in their portfolio.

“I talk to many programmers in NYC who follow the same staccato pattern: two years of coding for Credit Suisse, a year and a half building a blogging platform, three years at Morgan Stanley, two years creating a new web development framework. Since software developers in the city make so much, they can afford to save up and launch a startup every few years.

“Lousy programmers won’t anticipate the problems they are going to run up against later, so they happily go about building things that work for a while and fall apart later. Good programmers recognize those problems much earlier on, and try to architect around them. Excellent programmers recognize both the constraints of the technology and the constraints of the real world.

The difference between a lousy programmer and a good programmer is education and innate skill. But the difference between a good programmer and an excellent one is experience.

The experience of working with poorly built code can lead potentially excellent programmers to suffer from premature scalaculation.

“Dancing: The vertical expression of a horizontal desire legalized by music.

“You’re going to have to rewrite code. All the time. You have to be ok with it. You have to be willing. This is the secret of the great programmers, and the great stumbling block of those new to refactoring and TDD.

The bad news: Refactorings like extract object will require you to test drive a new class from scratch. All the time.
The good news: It’s much easier to rewrite when you have tests. You just haven’t noticed yet.