Joel Spolsky

Life is just too short to hate your job

think that some of the biggest mistakes people make—even at the highest architectural levels—come from having a weak or broken understanding of a few simple things at the very lowest levels

Whenever something seems like it should have linear performance but it seems to have n-squared performance, look for hidden Shlemiels. They are often hidden by your libraries.

It was the number one cause of hacks and worms in the olden days before Microsoft Outlook made hacking easy enough for teenagers to do

When you call malloc, it walks the linked list looking for a block of memory that is big enough for your request.

This is, incidentally, the same performance characteristic of garbage-collected systems, surprise surprise, so all the claims people make about how garbage collection imposes a performance penalty are not entirely true, since typical malloc implementations had the same kind of performance penalty, albeit milder

But I hardly ever choose a language based on syntax. Yeah, I prefer the {}; languages (C/C++/C#/Java). And I have lots of opinions about what makes a "good" syntax. But I wouldn't accept a 20MB runtime just to get semicolons

What this means is that if you have a schedule with a lot of bugs remaining to be fixed, the schedule is unreliable. But if you've fixed all the known bugs, and all that's left is new code, then your schedule will be stunningly more accurate

Personally, I overcame my fear of writing by taking a class in college that required a three- to five-page essay once a week. Writing is a muscle. The more you write, the more you'll be able to write.

Personally, I overcame my fear of writing by taking a class in college that required a three- to five-page essay once a week. Writing is a muscle. The more you write, the more you'll be able to write.