Aaron Swartz đã từng là một đứa trẻ không thể chịu nổi trường học, chán ngán tất cả các giờ lên lớp và mớ kiến thức nhảm nhí của nhà trường cung cấp. Từ nhỏ, anh đã ý thức được rằng tất cả những gì được dậy ở trường, anh có thể tự mày mò tìm hiểu và học hỏi:
Anh tin rằng: "Thông tin là quyền lực, và giống như mọi loại quyền lực khác, có những kẻ sẽ giữ nó cho riêng mình", vậy nên, "Thông tin cần được chia sẻ miễn phí".
Giống như anh, chúng tôi nhận ra rằng, nền giáo dục chúng ta đang có là một sự sai lầm lớn và cả xã hội đều đi từ sai lầm này đến sai lầm khác. Internet là một giải pháp, là cơ hội để chúng ta có thể chủ động tìm tòi kiến thức, tự giải phóng mình khỏi hệ thống đã bị các lỗi ăn lan bởi sự kiểm soát của các thế lực tham lam.
I like the pendulum metaphor: once we go to one extreme and get bitten by the results, we tend to avoid it at all costs and swing the other way. It applies to many things in life, including technology hype cycles.
Similarly, once we work with a messy codebase, we start paying extra attention to quality. Then, it’s easy to go too far in the other direction and over-engineer your next project.
For all history, transmitting information was slow. Brains were fast. After sending a letter, we had days or months to think before receiving an answer. Erasmus wrote his famous "Éloge de la folie" in several days while travelling in Europe. He would never have done it in a couple of hours in a plane while the small screen in the backseat would show him advertisements.
In essence, I would rather be remembered as a bad artist than a good programmer.
In safe zones, I know that my effort will return good, predictable results
Good leaders find mechanisms to inspect and audit the details and to understand anecdotes and the right teams
understand that the leaders who are looking at what they're doing and working with them on the details, are doing
so to help them be right a lot and achieve great results for customers.
This isn’t to say that abstractions are bad—far from it. Good abstractions are powerful. They enable us to build complex systems without getting lost in complexity. But we must recognize that abstractions are not free. They have real costs, both in terms of performance and complexity. And if an "abstraction" isn’t hiding complexity but is simply adding a layer of indirection, then it’s not an abstraction at all.
I have also encountered people (online) who didn’t know that you could render web pages on the server.
React was their default; I saw some static websites that were just static JSX in React. Like if you wanted to put up some photos of your apartment or vacation on your own domain, you would create a React app for that.