“An animal’s behaviour tends to maximize the survival of the genes for that behaviour, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it.

“One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach the subject in universities.

“Planning is often just a weakness forced on those who delegate.

“I maintain my todo lists and project plans as text files in version control, configured to automatically take a snapshot when I exit my text editor. This lets me look back over how my todo lists turn over. Their evolution provides a pretty good indicator of how I change over time.

“Like postcards from strangers, snakes are frequently misunderstood.

“‘:freekeys’ command to show keys that are not used and available for mapping.

“It was important where our classic minimalism wasn’t working that we adapt.

“The first step in any potentially impossible project is, of course, to announce that you are on the verge of succeeding.

“The key focus of distributed version control compared to centralized systems like CVS and Subversion: support for merging with people you don’t know.