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Lisp programmers should stop reading right now because they'll likely suffer severe injury of the jaw muscles as they laugh themselves silly at how hard it is to do some things in C.

The C language has a pre-processor (typically called cpp) that is both infuriating and powerful.

How powerful is usually best described as 'just too little' and it has happened more than once that I found myself almost - but not quite - able to do what I wanted to do.

If you plan to go and do your own company, or a company together with a bunch of buddies or some other wild thing you plan then I want you to realize this to the core of your being or you probably should not even start until you do: you very likely will fail but it doesn't matter one bit.

The only thing that really matters is that you try and not succeeding is already much much better than never starting

Recently I had the pleasure of meeting with an old friend. We caught up about all the stuff we'd been up to since we last saw each other several years ago and one of the things he mentioned was that he'd gone to work for Google as a programmer.

Offhandedly he remarked that 'what you read in forums about salaries at Google is not correct, I'm pushing $250k per year'. And that's for someone approaching 30 years of age, programming, not a manager or something like that.

As usual I get a ton of mail on subjects that are controversial. One of the more painful ones was the fact that the Dropping out is probably not for you post gave people the impression that I'm against studying the arts, literature or any other non-hard science.

I guess it was to be expected the way I phrased things there so let me take a moment to correct this perception. The offending lines are right at the start in:

"a) useful

b) a marketable skill"

Admitting that may be career suicide, or possibly it will cost me dearly because 'software engineers' are raking in the big bucks these days, but the fact of the matter is that I'm a programmer. It's what I do best and it is the job title that I associate with most because it feels as though the biggest chunk of me will always be most likely to blurt that out when people ask me what my job is. That I like to program definitely helps.

The following piece pre-supposes that if you are in school or university you're doing so to learn something that is:

If those conditions are not met, please ignore the rest of this post, you have already made some bad decisions and the question of staying in or dropping out is the least of your problems.

Me, I blame the IDEs.

A while ago I got into an argument about 'heroes'. Whether I look up to Steve Jobs more than Bill Gates or Larry Ellison or something to that effect.

The funny thing is that I look up to none of them.

Sure, they've created wealth beyond belief and they've been very influential in their own right, I even use some of their products. But they're not my heroes.

My heroes are a pretty odd list, it contains names that may not even ring a bell to most people.

I'm not going to give you an exhaustive list, but I can give you a sample to give you an idea of who my heroes are:

On http://www.takethislollipop.com/ there is a nice little movie that shows you what the implications of enabling a facebook app could be in a way that is hard to ignore.

I sent the link to my s.o. and a bunch of friends and extended family and the responses I'm getting are interesting to put it mildly.

Of course being the messenger is a pretty sure way to get shot at but it certainly seems that this video is a way to break the ice and get people to think a bit more about their online privacy.

One of the most interesting exchanges on this subject today was this:

Recently I came upon a post on hacker news about a man that had quit his job and that recounted his failure, after a full six months. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3102143

First of all, I'd like to thank the author for having the guts to write this out, some of it is really painful and he's quite the man to stand up like this in front of large community and speak his mind. That alone marks him as someone that will one day make it big.