“To imagine that Bret Victor spends a lot of his time collecting jokes for his examples (like you and me) does him a gross injustice.

“The point of this Churchill quote: failures are point events, but success is a process.

“Existential angst just happens when we don’t like what we are doing. Asking why we are here is a hard problem, but if the problem’s really just liking what you do, that is much easier. Just realizing that the problem is easier gave me a lift.

“In the beginning don’t worry about how you will organize what you write. Write ideas down because writing them down is strictly better than not writing them down.

The only concern is to set things up to make writing easy, and so improve the odds you will sustain the habit.

“retrospective (rèt´re-spèk-tîv) — a ritual held at the end of a project to learn from the experience and to plan changes for the next effort.

“Any macro facility incapable of this particular application is not the true macro facility.

“We have version control, wikis, Web sites, lots of tools, but most of those tools focus on collaboration within a project. If you’re in a project, you know where to go, and who to talk to within your project. The big problem is collaboration between projects.

“Capistrano is a tool for automating tasks on one or more remote servers. It executes commands in parallel on all targeted machines, and provides a mechanism for rolling back changes across multiple machines.

“Cold call me if you have started a company and need help.