One who works with their hands is a laborer.
One who works with their hands and their mind is a craftsman.
One who works with their hands, mind and heart is an artist.

The 3 virtues of a programmer as defined by Larry Wall, Randal L. Schwartz and Tom Christiansen (in Programming Perl).

– **Laziness – The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure.** It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer. Also hence, this book. See also impatience and hubris.
– **Impatience – The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don’t just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them.** Or at least pretend to. Hence, the second great virtue of a programmer. See also laziness and hubris.
– **Hubris – Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won’t want to say bad things about.** Hence, the third great virtue of a programmer. See also laziness and impatience.

“Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you’ll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don’t think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn’t solve some fairly immediate need, it’s almost certainly over-designed. And don’t expect people to jump in and help you. That’s not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say “hey, that almost works for me”, and they’ll get involved in the project.” — Linus Torvalds

When you die you can’t take anything or anyone with you. This includes your family, friends, money and belongings. Memories are all that remain. Make them count.

“Vance and Madison inspire me. So do others like them who refuse the excuses and follow their hearts against all odds. Because of them, I realize that being “me”, in exactly the way I was born to be, is the only way to truly live.”

“The best thing we can do is to accept the fact that labels mean nothing, and realize that the seemingly nonsensical choices of others actually do make a lot of sense if we have the patience and fortitude to uncover the reasons behind these choices.”

from http://www.marcandangel.com/2008/12/22/be-who-you-were-born-to-be/

Making money can seem a goal that goes against helping the world becoming a better place. I was talking with a friend about this and suddenly I realized maybe I could write a few lines about it. Maybe first I should say the context in which this discussion occurred it was related with entrepreneurs (specifically people starting startup companies), so the real question I’m trying to answer is:

How making money with your startup company can help the world becoming a better place?

I think there isn’t anything wrong with making money and help the world, you just need to be an entrepreneur. In fact, one of the things that the world desperately needs right now, is that more people become entrepreneurs and initiatives that support them in the process. Don’t shoot me just yet!! The reason I say that is because the organizations and companies that those people will create, are the best options we have to help us with the real things that the world needs in order to become a better place.

And what exactly are those things? And how exactly can they help? In almost every area of the society (environment, politics, education, health, etc) there is many things that can be done: more environment caring, more recycling, fighting poverty, bringing technology to the poor countries, fighting corruption, fighting world hunger, more efficient fuels, etc.). And the products that big and small organizations produce should try to address these problems. But these are just my thoughts. What about you, what do you think?