i am trying to build a jigsaw puzzle which has no lid and is missing half of the pieces. i am unable to show you what it will be, but i can show you some of the pieces and why they matter to me. if you are building a different puzzle, it is possible that these pieces won't mean much to you, maybe they won't fit or they won't fit yet. then again, these might just be the pieces you're looking for. this is summing up, please find previous editions here.

• start-ups and emotional debt, i realize that many people who do successful start-ups say it was the best thing that ever happened to them. but they've also become different people, and they are not the same people they would have been if they had decided to pursue another course. they have different sets of relationships, different skills, different attitudes, and different desires. they really have no idea what kind of person they otherwise would have been become. recommended
• waffling, i've always been very dubious about the idea of learning from people who have been successful. there's this whole cult of worshipping rich people, reading interviews with them, getting their opinions on things, trying to learn what made them successful. i think it's mostly nonsense. the thing is, if you just look at who the biggest earners are, it's almost entirely luck. the point is if you just look at successful business people, they will probably be confident, decisive, risk takers, aggressive at seizing opportunities, aggressive about growing the business quickly, etc. that doesn't mean that those are the right things to do. it just means that those are variance-increasing traits that give them a chance to be a big success
• why don't software development methodologies work?, my own experience, validated by cockburn's thesis and frederick brooks in no silver bullet, is that software development projects succeed when the key people on the team share a common vision, what brooks calls "conceptual integrity." this doesn't arise from any particular methodology, and can happen in the absence of anything resembling a process. i know the feeling working on a team where everyone clicks and things just get done
• 7 principles of rich web applications, the web remains one of the most versatile mediums for the transmission of information. as we continue to add more dynamism to our pages, we must ensure that we retain some of its great historical benefits while we incorporate new ones
• "the road to wisdom? - well, it's plain and simple to express: err and err and err again but less and less and less", piet hein