Sublime

Writing code, where most of us are well-versed, is only about 30% of the work needed to launch a successful product.

Most of the big last gains in software productivity have come from removing artificial barriers that have made the accidental tasks inordinately hard, such as severe hardware constraints, awkward programming languages, lack of machine time. How much of what software engineers now do is still devoted to the accidental, as opposed to the essential? U

When you try to do 100 percent of what somebody wants, you need a perfect match, and it's pretty rare that you have a perfect match between what you thought people needed and what they actually need. If you just try instead to do 80 percent of what they need, there's a pretty good chance that you'll hit a sweet spot. So Rails is really about trying

My whole life was basically trying to optimize things. You don't just save parts, but every time you save parts you save on complexity and reliability, the amount of time it takes to understand something. And how good you can build it without errors and bugs and flaws.

The interesting thing is what they copied. They didn't really copy the code; they copied the implementation of how FogBugz works. But they missed what made us successful. They didn't really copy Joel on Software. And I think what's happening to those seven people right now is they are getting an object lesson that merely copying the product that an

Livingston: Why did users like Viaweb? Graham: I think the main thing was that it was easy. Practically all the software in the world is either broken or very difficult to use. So users dread software. They've been trained that whenever they try to install something, or even fill out a form online, it's not going to work. I dread installing stuff,