You can go broke generating revenue. You can’t go broke generating profit.

Most managers attempt to minimize an employee’s bad work instead of maximizing their good work. When 98% of an employee’s work is great and 2% is not, managers give feedback on the 2%.

Let’s just get this out there: on paper, I’m a terrible CEO. I avoid going into the office, I only meet with my team a couple times a week, and I especially hate giving speeches, coming up with vision statements, leading meetings, and all the other CEO-y stuff you read about in HBR. To make matters worse, I rarely start work before noon.

Most people shouldn't be worried about AI stealing their jobs. Small bash scripts maybe, but not AI.

Nothing will change your future trajectory like your habits.

We all have goals, big or small, things we want to achieve within a certain time frame. Maybe you want to make a million dollars by the time you turn 30. Or to lose 20 pounds before summer. Or to write a book in the next six months. When we begin to chase a vague concept (success, wealth, health, happiness), making a tangible goal is often the first step.

Tech debt:

1. Realize you have it.
2. Care.
3. Fix it.
4. Enjoy faster development, fewer bugs, and more time doing whatever you love.

Several people asked: Q: How do you avoid tech debt at Stack Overflow? A: We don’t. No one can. We constantly allocate time to fixing it.

Even if you’re not in sales, you’re in sales. You have to sell your ideas, your point of view, your suggestions, your value, your…

Your company's most valuable resource is people giving a shit. Ask yourself: does your system encourage or discourage that?

Disappointment occurs when expectations don’t match reality. And our expectations for software quality are profoundly unrealistic. Thus, lots of people are continuously disappointed — even enraged — by software bugs. They shouldn’t be.

design is too important to be left to just designers

Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonder about this. Is life actually short, or are we really complaining about its finiteness? Would we be just as likely to feel life was short if we lived 10 times as long?

Хочу рассказать, как я начинаю работу над каждым проектом.

Раньше мне казалось, что это просто: обменялись парой писем или потрындели в скайпе пять минут — и всё, пора за работу. Ну вроде ты редактор, профессионал, знаешь что делать. Чего тут обсуждать, никогда не редактировал текст что ли?

На деле всё оказывается иначе.

I think I found a sane approach to “life” todo workflow. Backlog -> Needs Action <-> Needs Reaction -> Done.

Behavioral economics postulates the concept that people make “irrational” decisions because they are influenced by social factors. Identifying the resulting emotions helps to understand why people take the actions they do.

I read Agile is the new Waterfall at first with disgust, then with horror, and then finally with a meager amount of very qualified approval.

Computer science gives you far more leverage to change the world than any other study in our age.

Секрет всех деятельных людей прост — энергия рождается в самом действии.

Я тут столкнулся со странной проблемой организации рабочих задач. Про себя называю эту проблему «бульдозеризмом». Рассказываю.

Programming is a constant struggle between "What is harder: Implementing it myself, or understanding the existing, undocumented solution?"

Один из очень интересных инструментов в арсенале дизайнера - работающие паузы.

Часто бывает, что нужно усадить жопу на стул, и просто честно махать интеллектуальной киркой час: дизайн не сделает себя сам. Тут все понятно.

Проблема наступает тогда, когда морщить лоб предстоит часов десять.

Founders: consider adding to your monthly updates a "what we stopped doing this month" section. Subtraction is investment by another name.

The secret to getting rich is the same as the secret to being an outlier in most fields: to enjoy doing things that make one rich.

“A year from now you will wish you had started today.” - Karen Lamb

The important things will never be on your exams.

Деньги ты заработаешь, людей — наймешь. Потраченное время уже не вернешь. Это невосполнимый конечный ресурс в твоей битве с конкурентами.

В году 250 рабочих дней. Это 25 шансов серьезно улучшить продукт. 25 выстрелов в твоей битве. Это мало, поэтому не трать время зря.

Пожалуй, всем знакома ситуация, когда хочется проигнорировать будильник и поглубже завернуться в одеяло. Рано вставать не нравится никому, просто «жаворонки», в отличие от «сов», к этому привыкли. Редким счастливчикам по роду деятельности ранний подъем не обязателен, и они вполне легитимно спят до полудня. Серийный предприниматель Брэндон Тернер был одним из них, пока однажды не решил встать пораньше ради эксперимента. Забегая наперед, скажем, что с тех пор он боготворит свой будильник.

As a teenager, I remember playing strategy games like X-COM, Civilization, and Red Alert.

These games use a mechanic known as “the fog of war.” When a player starts the game, they are immersed in an overhead map that is shrouded by darkness. The only way to reveal your surroundings is to explore. As you make moves, more and more of the map becomes visible.

Even with a stellar team, chock-full of strong expertise, it’s hard to create a long-lasting company. The tenacious workers that make it through the initial challenges of forming a company face the complicated task of aligning the company towards a common goal that seems ever-changing (in a competitive and fickle landscape).

Do you ever wonder how successful companies continue to navigate and grow? I often wondered how the companies I admired knew what direction to go — and it became apparent that the trick was being almost irresponsibly aggressive in growing key objectives with a talented group of people.

Вы бедны, потому что неамбициозны.

Перед тем, как основать Alibaba, я пригласил к себе 24 друзей, чтобы обсудить эту бизнес-возможность. Мы проговорили уже два часа, но они все еще были немного сбиты с толку — должен признать, что тогда я высказывался не вполне внятно. Вердикт: 23 из 24, находящихся тогда в комнате, сказали мне бросить эту идею по множеству причин. Например: «Ты ничего не знаешь об интернете, и что важнее, у тебя нет стартового капитала».

Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't.

Giving people instructions creates dependence. People giving intent creates independence.

It's time for the password to die. Users suck at creating secure passwords. Companies suck at keeping those passwords safe.

Can’t say it enough: surround yourself w/people who are trying to better themselves, growing + who appreciate life. It changes things.

Вокруг столько интересного и красивого! А люди не только проживают свою жизнь в офисах, но и убеждают себя в том, что им это нравится.

There is a correlation between startup success and code quality. Unfortunately it's negative.

The easiest way to organize your stuff is to get rid of most of it.

When reporting a bug to an engineer, never ever ever say “it’s broken”. Instead, say “when I did X, I expected Y, but got Z”. Trust me.

Junior Dev: thinks they know everything

Regular Dev: thinks they know nothing

Senior Dev: hates computers

Люси — представитель поколения Y: людей, рожденных в конце 70-х — начале 90-х годов. Сейчас им по 20-30 лет, они закончили вузы и теперь работают. Если они работают в большом городе и занимаются интеллектуальным трудом, их называют «Юппи» — young urban professionals, молодые трудоустроенные горожане. Люси как раз такая.

1999 - $5M to launch a product, 30M serious computer users. 2014 - $5K to launch, 3B serious phone users. Leverage / $ is up 100,000x.

The bar is SO low on great customer experiences that as long as you give a F$%* you'll be ahead of 90% of other companies.

Just learned about the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s why un-skilled people think they know more than experts in a particular subject

"When promised quick profits, respond with a quick 'no.'", Warren Buffet

Steve Jobs: "there is a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product."

Основная причина гибели хороших интернет-сообществ — отказ от самозащиты.

Где-нибудь в необъятных недрах интернета это происходит прямо сейчас. Когда-то на этом месте был чистый ухоженный сад для интеллектуальных бесед, куда приходили образованные и заинтересованные люди, привлечённые высоким уровнем доносящихся оттуда речей. Но вот в сад прибывает глупец и уровень бесед чуточку падает — или даже не на чуточку, если глупец вмешивается в разговоры с упорством, достойным лучшего применения.

"Многие зависшие дела могут сдвинуться с мертвой точки в результате действия, на которое требуется не более 2 минут" Дэвид Аллен.

The Creative Process

1. This is awesome
2. This is tricky
3. This is shit
4. I am shit
5. This might be ok
6. This is awesome

How much does it cost Wikipedia to have one more person read an article? How much does it cost Chanel to produce one more bottle of perfume? How about one more digital copy of a Grateful Dead concert?

"a designer who doesn't understand the language of engineering is like being an architect that doesn't understand gravity."

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” Thomas Edison

Always: "Hard work beats talent when talent don't work hard."

Bilingual Child was supposed to be an experiment. We built it in 6 weeks, working on it nights & weekends.

The app was free to download with one available book, including ten vocabulary words, and two additional books offered as an in-app purchase of $1.99.

For the first two months after releasing it we let it sit. We had never released an iOS application and had little idea what to do to market it. To our surprise, it slowly picked up steam. $5 a day. $10 a day. Then $15 a day.

Remember, mondays are fine. It's your life that sucks.

After startups raise money, their next biggest problem becomes hiring. It turns out it’s both really hard and really important to hire good people; in fact, it’s probably the most important thing a founder does.

Don't tweet for the people that follow you. Tweet for the people you wished followed you.

На сегодняшний день рынок товаров и услуг офлайн (торговые точки, магазины, ларьки) отходит на второй план, люди начинают все больше и больше доверять онлайн-магазинам, и совершать покупки именно в сети Интернет. В связи с этим, количество интернет магазинов в Украине растёт с каждым месяцем, и практически все, не исключая самые крупные и раскрученные интернет магазины, нуждаются в свежем взгляде на решение своей главной проблемы,- проблемы увеличения продаж.

When I started at Facebook in 2006, we had 5M users. MySpace had 100M users. Anything is possible.

There has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. Never in history has the path to market been cheaper or faster.

Visionary. Good at executing/operating. Talented.

Choose two.

There are three problems with getting your first few customers:

1. You (probably) don’t know how to sell things
2. You don’t know who you’re selling to
3. You don’t even really know what you’re selling

Not knowing is part of the journey. That is all we need to know.

“We want to limit the length of a review in the product to 140 characters, because we may want to use SMS at some stage. That’s a small change, right?”

Wrong.

Optimize your UI for the most common use cases, not for the worst case scenario.

There is a huge amount of freedom that comes to you when you take nothing personally.

Rich people have nothing in common. They seem totally random.

But powerful people—one thing is absolute: they wake up early every day.

“Do one thing every day that scares you.”―Eleanor Roosevelt

The Division's motto: "Design is about removing, not adding."

to get a project right, you should plan a major code refactor around 3/4 time in the development schedule.

A business needs to be able to move at two speeds: fast and slow. So what happens when you've lost your get-up-and-go?

Один венгерский профессор психологии написал нескольким известным людям запросы на интервью для своей книги про творческих людей. Его удивило то, сколько из них ответили твердым отказом.

"There is only one success – to be able to spend your life in your own way" – C. Morley

Adopt good ideas faster.

Nearly all the most successful founders are revolutionaries. They want power, not money. That makes them hard to stop.

Как прав был мой мануальщик, что лучшая замена ему - плавание. Все боли в спине как рукой снимает. Плавание - ЖИЗНЬ!

If you launch and no one notices, launch again. We launched 3 times.

Time management can be tough. What is urgent in your life and what is important to your life are often very different things.

This is especially true with your health, where the important issues almost never seem urgent even though your life ultimately hangs in the balance.

Heard from a Navy seal: "Under pressure, you don't rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training. Why we train so hard."

As a programmer it’s your job to avoid writing code as much as possible.

вообще я убежден, что в современном мире возможность НЕ РАБОТАТЬ - это главная цель и жизненный стимул для любого мыслящего человека

dear world: stop asking me to talk on the phone. i hate the phone.

“To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.” ― Aristotle

И помните, что именно сейчас, где-то в мире, есть человек, более занятый чем вы, который занимается спортом.

The Apple iPod instantly turned the MP3 player market upside down, right? Amazon changed the book selling business like a shot, didn’t it? Well, in fact they didn’t. No matter how it may seem from the outside.

1. Мир хочет, чтобы вы оставались тупыми.

Чем вы тупее, тем вам проще продать продукты и услуги. Размер диагонали телевизора обратно пропорционален коэффициенту интеллекта.

"The harder I worked, the luckier I got." ~Thomas Jefferson

Marketing Mix, a term coined by Neil Borden, are the ingredients that combine to capture and promote a brand or product’s unique selling points, those that differentiate it from it’s competitors. The ideas behind Borden’s model were refined over the years until E. Jerome McCarthy reduced them to 4 elements called “The Four Ps.” This proposed classification has been used by marketing companies, branding agencies and web design companies throughout the world.

"I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been" -Wayne Gretsky

A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.

protip: if the language allows it, put a comma at the end of a multi-line data structure. merge/rebase will work correctly more often.

It would cost $60 billion to start a human Mars colony. Our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan & Pakistan have cost over $3.4 trillion.

If you don't build your dreams, someone will hire you to build theirs.

Great Quote: "Sell benefits, not features. Nobody who bought a drill wanted a drill. They wanted a hole"

Apple 2005: 2560×1600 res, 30", $3,000, monitor only.
Apple 2012: 2880x1600 res, 15", $2,199—with a computer attached.

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. - Bill Cosby

"Make things people fall in love with. Not things they just tolerate."— @aral

There's always better. There's always faster. There's always more. But there will never be another now.

"Being busy" is such a fetish in the startup world. The best entrepreneurs and investors I've met are alarmingly responsive.

I do love our industry, very very much. We have a unique ability to get riled over pure passion for our job. Not many have that.