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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor (slightly modified)

 

Being in charge of ourselves leaves us with a huge responsibility to come up with strategies to either fix, or cover up, weak spots.

Buster Benson, Random thoughts on being in charge

All too often, I see entrepreneurs who say they “just need engineers” to “bang out the code” for this great idea of theirs. If you view engineers as interchangeable factory workers instead of partners and creative people, you’re in for a tough time getting huge in a world driven by technology.

Chad Dickerson, Scaling startups [via Buzz Andersen]

So let me explain Social Networking. It’s a fancy term that means Facebook.

Jesse Schell, Visions of the Gamepocalypse

Data dominates. If you’ve chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.

Rob Pike, Notes on Programming in C [via Douglas]

In streets designed to safely handle the actions of the riskiest participants, everyone slips into riskier behavior.

Tom Vanderbilt, The Traffic Guru

Instead of analyzing the strength of the argument, those with authority focus on whether or not the argument confirms what they already believe. If it doesn’t, then the facts are conveniently ignored.

Jonah Lehrer, The Power Trip

Good programmers want to work with other good programmers. So once the quality of programmers at your company starts to drop, you enter a death spiral from which there is no recovery.

Paul Graham, What Happened to Yahoo [via ★]

As a rule, any software in this century that reinvents the scroll bar deserves to fail.

Scott Berkun, Lessons from Google Wave and MSFT Kin, who goes on to say that “Wave is far from a failure” for the team that created it

In the software business, you can’t afford not to have a hacker-centric culture.

Paul Graham, What Happened to Yahoo [via ★]

Success hides problems.

Ed Catmull, President, Pixar, What Google Could Learn From Pixar [via ★]

If there’s chaos, things will tend toward simple solutions. In chaos people don’t listen to reason.

Sen. Tom Harkin, quoted in George Packer’s The Empty Chamber: Just how broken is the Senate

…the distance between the face one presents to the world, and the face presented inward to oneself, cannot no longer become too great. Like water finding its level, the inward face will become known. The truth, or at least more of its constituent parts, will out. In the big picture, that’s a good thing. Those who have the most to fear from an open environment are ones with closed agendas, for whom public debate is a threat rather than an opportunity. Long-term strength lies in persuasion grounded in fact, rather than on carefully constructed artifice.

Jonathan Zittrain, Technology Lessons from the Wikileaks Saga [via @Lessig]