Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

Calvin Coolidge (Discovered this as my MITian friend Ankur's gmail chat status)

The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future. You're going to look like you have magic powers compared to everybody else.

Gabe Newell, Founder and President, Valve (Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU1xS07N-FA courtesy of code.org)

Musing over The Challenge

It’s been 10 days since I started this challenge. Up to now, I seem to be failing in living up to the daily requirement in the Fibonacci order (0, 1, 1, 2 – the day gaps); of course, I don’t want the sequence to continue.

In retrospect, I can see what stopped me in the days I missed – once it was just a tiring day, someday it was work/extended meeting, some day just plain lack of creativity. And then, there is the fear of mediocrity - uncertainty over the quality of content that I can generate on a daily basis (Do read up  on Oatmeal’s view on this).

 

I have come to believe that perhaps the writing challenge I have undertaken is not so important as the quality of content I post. Sharing a quote, or a few photographs do not seem enough to just live up to the daily task. A fairly decent write-up takes anywhere between an hour to three hours to produce (and sometimes days if you count the breaks in between), an amount of time I can’t devote on a daily basis right now. Does it sound like giving up on the challenge? Yes and no. Yes, because in literal terms it won’t go to completion; no, because perhaps I failed to consider the practicality of such a challenge but will continue to post more often this month than ever before.

I will now focus on writing about things that I had in mind since long, some of which are lying incomplete in my drafts folder. Stay tuned.

 

I spent my years from age 11 to 19 thinking about software. And if I have something that I really know, it's software. I'm a hobbyist in biotech, but I could never go and make a world-class contribution in another field.

Bill Gates. Source: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2002-11-18/news/27331168_1_bill-gates-kumar-mangalam-birla-aditya-vikram-birla-group/2 (This was a great inspiration when choosing CS as a discipline after school; I seem to have forgotten how big an ideal Gates was for me then.)

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live. Code for readability.

John F Woods. Source: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.c++/rYCO5yn4lXw/oITtSkZOtoUJ (With special attribution to two juniors who posted this on homepage of CSEA's upcoming website.)

Having good teachers is important. This can make or kill your interests. Even Kalam attributes being what he is today to him having great teachers. Unfortunately, this is something which is not under one’s control.

me (on a twitter conversation with Delbin about electives, teachers and interest in subjects)

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

Charles Baudelaire (discovered this in Vinod Pathari Sir's email signature and found it particularly interesting)

Intension and Extension

To give an "intensional definition" is to define a word or phrase in terms of other words, as a dictionary does. To give an "extensional definition" is to point to examples, as adults do when teaching children. The preceding sentence gives an intensional definition of "extensional definition", which makes it an extensional example of "intensional definition".

Source: http://lesswrong.com/lw/nh/extensions_and_intensions/

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

Dennis Ritchie. Source: http://www.linfo.org/q_unix.html See also Ashik's post about his death - http://aashiks.in/blog/?p=270

...even if you wrote 100% of the code, and even if you are the best programmer in the world and will never need any help with the project at all, the thing that really matters is the users of the code. The code itself is unimportant; the project is only as useful as people actually find it.

Linus Torvalds, on Software Development Management. Source: http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/Feature-Articles/Linus-Torvalds-s-Lessons-on-Software-Development-Management/ba-p/440