Seth

“Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.”
― Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary

“To understand this first event, you need to know that we rely on Unix and Linux machines to store the thousands of computer files that comprise all the shots of any given film. And on those machines, there is a command—/bin/rm -r -f *—that removes everything on the file system as fast as it can. Hearing that, you can probably anticipate what’s coming: Somehow, by accident, someone used this command on the drives where the Toy Story 2 files were kept. Not just some of the files, either. All of the data that made up the pictures, from objects to backgrounds, from lighting to shading, was dumped out of the system. First, Woody’s hat disappeared. Then his boots. Then he disappeared entirely. One by one, the other characters began to vanish, too: Buzz, Mr. Potato Head, Hamm, Rex. Whole sequences—poof!—were deleted from the drive. Oren”
― Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

“Restating the problem in a more formal manner is a great technique for gaining insight into a problem.”
― V. Anton Spraul, Think Like a Programmer: An Introduction to Creative Problem Solving

“For programmers, then, we can define problem solving as writing an original program that performs a particular set of tasks and meets all stated constraints.”
― V. Anton Spraul, Think Like a Programmer: An Introduction to Creative Problem Solving