Kalzumeus Software Year in Review 2016
I owe a great deal of my own personal success to Patrick McKenzie and Thomas Ptacek, both of whom have been steadfast, consistent and generous advisors (both in public comments and in &quot;hey can I bounce this off of you&quot; emails).<p>After following Patrick&#x27;s writings and stories for a number of years now, I can confidently say that his relentless transparency has been one of the greatest gifts I received in the industry. His advice may not strictly work for everyone in the literal sense, but I believe that diligently attempting to use his suggestions as a template is, itself, a highly productive exercise in programming and business.<p>There is one particular note I want to make about patio11&#x27;s success: Patrick is a phenomenal marketer with remarkable business savvy who <i>happens to be a programmer.</i> He is <i>not</i> primarily a programmer, which is evidenced by his recent work at Stripe and the work he is best known for on HN (essentially, writing about shipping software, not the software itself).<p>This is not to say he is not a good programmer - I simply can&#x27;t comment on that, though I have reason to believe he is after seeing Starfighter&#x27;s game. Rather, he leverages that skill set as a means to an end, not an end in itself.<p>I think this is a really important point to make because I see many people who try to pursue significant career success by e.g. ranking up on TopCoder, or open sourcing impressive software. While those things can lead to success, there is a vast, long tail of people who are very capable programmers with no recognition doing those things. Healthy self-promotion and <i>efficient</i> improvement&#x2F;maintenance of one&#x27;s technical skills has a much higher probability of success than attempting to become Fabrice Bellard.<p>This is demonstrative - in my opinion, the sum of all of patio11&#x27;s advice can be summarized as follows: <i>Don&#x27;t be a programmer, be a $SOMETHING who happens to program, and program well.</i>