“If you can’t think of a time when you held off on refactoring something because thinking up names was too hard, you’re a better man than me.

“When you add a developer to a team you incur at least two fixed costs. The first is in raw currency, the salary you have to pay out. The second is in lines spent—the rate of codebase growth is certain to go up.

Both fixed costs increase your burn rate; only one increase is predictable.

“If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as “lines produced” but as “lines spent”: the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.

“The more lightweight the process, the more disciplined you have to be in following it. Discipline can and should coexist with iterating on the process.

“We’re not a replacement for venture capital funds. We occupy a new, adjacent niche. VCs are playing a zero-sum game. They’re all competing for a slice of a fixed amount of “deal flow,” and that explains a lot of their behavior. Our m.o. is to create new deal flow, by encouraging hackers who would have gotten jobs to start their own startups instead. We compete more with employers than VCs.

“A creator needs to acquire only 1000 true fans to make a living.

“Legacy code is code which has no automated tests.

“Collection of Rules” is a decent metaphor for programming languages, and some languages have more rules than others. But it is orthogonal to the metaphor of languages as tools.

“A Hacker is always trying new things, trying to stretch the limits of what’s possible or what exists. Once something is functional and successful, the hacker moves on to another hard problem.