A book I think is crucial is Creativity, Inc. (the Pixar book). The most important piece of its perspective, I think, is the idea that managers can screw things up in a bajillion ways, and that it takes consistent work and focus to create an environment where people WANT to bring up problems, WANT to bring in ideas, and WANT to do their best work.

Another valuable book is Moral Mazes -- it's a tough read, but the takeaway is that managers are almost universally insecure, like INSANELY insecure, because they don't really produce something tangible, they produce the feeling of stability and predictably and (most important) loyalty in THEIR managers, and how the heck do you measure that? They're always one misunderstanding or failure to anticipate a problem or to quell some fussing away from being fired, or shut out of promotion. They exist in a terrifying state of status uncertainty. If they're not careful -- like REALLY, REALLY, affirmatively, pro-actively careful -- they'll create an environment where the people under them, who have front-line knowledge to bring, will suppress problems and avoid difficult conversations because they'll know how upset their manager will get. This can be incredibly costly. A good manager has to be brave, not just for themselves, but for those under them who need bravery to speak up. And that manager needs to go to bat every single time someone under them is right -- even if it costs the manager their job.

Of course, few managers understand this advice or have the slightest spine to stand up for what they (internally think they) believe in. It's much more common to find managers who deal with "the wrong person" under them having a good point (and feeling embarassed, or worried that a superior will feel embarassed) by covering for it by getting angry.

I really liked this -- it's so true about my road to programming (pseudo-) expertise. Almost everything I've been paid to do, I first did on a hobby level, just messing around with my own projects and ideas.

What is "Three"?

Pretty sweet. Eventually DOOM crashed but man what that fun. Bravo

Wow, I've never felt so seen by an essay.

I'm a dedicated Evernote user. I add just about everything I generate or want to record to Evernote, in one big "notebook", and then I extensively use tagging to make sure everything is findable. I try to use every tag I might ever search for, for which this note would be relevant.

Sometimes I add content to existing notes, if they are relevant and include the same family of concepts. I often merge notes; e.g., I save all my tweets to Evernote via IFTTT, and then merge all of them for each given month.

I often add notes with no tagging at all, and I have a shortcut to search for notes with no tags, as a sort of inbox.

The ability to search everything at once is the key: I can search "movies" or "startup" or "medicine" and find everything with those tags, or those words in the title or text, or even in PDFs. (I use a Fuji ScanSnap to scan documents into Evernote, with fully searchable text.)

The biggest feature I wish for is transcription of voice notes or audio files, so the content would be searchable.

Evernote's Mac app is notoriously slow, but it's gotten better over the years. I still don't understand why they can't make it as fast as the web app.