"That's why Jordan Mechner's advice -- and it's so beautiful -- is to proceed from 1 to 3 to 2. Go right from the inspiration -- the vision -- to actually making it. Don't think it through. Don't talk about it. Don't plan it. Dive in and start making it happen. If you do that -- if you can start rocking -- you'll get some momentum, and when you have some momentum then the project has a chance, because now you're into it. It's going somewhere, it's tangible. Sure, you'll still run up against problems to solve and decisions to make, but you'll approach these in the moment and solve them in the moment. You'll solve them so you can keep moving."

"Being intelligent is like having a knife. If you train every day in using the knife, you will be invincible. If you think that just having a knife will make you win any battle you fight, then you will fail."

"Every time engineers want to test a tweak, they run the new algorithm on a tiny percentage of random users, letting the rest of the site’s searchers serve as a massive control group. There are so many changes to measure that Google has discarded the traditional scientific nostrum that only one experiment should be conducted at a time. 'On most Google queries, you’re actually in multiple control or experimental groups simultaneously,' says search quality engineer Patrick Riley. Then he corrects himself. 'Essentially,' he says, 'all the queries are involved in some test.' In other words, just about every time you search on Google, you’re a lab rat."

Test. All. The. Time.

A great callout about user experience in an app that works with multiple languages. The author correctly identifies the problem of languages like Japanese that use multiple writing systems, but I would add Chinese to that list as well with its traditional and simplified character sets, which don't all nicely map one-to-one. Chinese is massively popular on the internet, poised to surpass English in fact, and a lot of that content (from HKers, Taiwanese, Singaporeans and overseas Chinese) uses the traditional system.