Rediscovering Paul Graham
Today I’ve been doing a lot of reading. The majority of which has been off of Paul Graham’s website. I think I first came across his site last year reading an essay he wrote called A Plan for Spam. Since then, I’ve stumbled upon links to other essays he’s written, but never took much time to read more of them. After reading a few today, I have to say, I love this stuff! He’s like another Joel Spolsky for me.
Recently, I found a very unique language and development environment for building web applications called Wheat. As I poked around the site trying to learn more Wheat, I found a link to a Paul Graham essay called Being Popular, which discusses how programming languages get popular as an effort to describe the hacker’s dream language. I was too interested in Wheat to read it when I found it, but today I came back to it and now I love reading these essays.
Among the essays today, I read Taste for Makers, which explains that taste is not personal preference, but instead it’s the act of recognizing beauty, which isn’t as subjective most people think. It then goes on to describe attributes of good design that many fields have in common. Some of the attributes seemed obvious, especially to people that design things, but the explainations for them are very much worth reading.
In that essay, ‘Good design is often slightly funny’ stood out for me. Will Wright, one of my design idols, says one of his tricks for tough design problems is to fall back to humor. It seems to work better than most people would think, and it’s something I wish I did more–I take myself too seriously sometimes.
I started trying some other links on his site and found Y Combinator, a unique venture firm he’s involved in. This by itself is really interesting, in particular their Summer Founders Program. The firm’s site had a resource page with links to relavant articles and essays. A good number of them I’ve read, but many I hadn’t, so I decided to try some.
The first two were very inspiring Paul Graham essays. Hiring is Obsolete is along the lines of David Weekly’s The IP Slave Wage and other recent posts in the blogosphere about how easy it is to do a startup these days–basically encouraging entrepreneurialism in programmers. In this case, it points out why programmers in their early twenties should start their own company. Then I went on to read How to Start a Startup, which is a pretty damn good guide to doing a technology startup.
The last thing I read wasn’t a Paul Graham essay, but it was on the list of resources at Y Combinator. It was an article called Journey to the Center of Google on Men.Style.com oddly enough, which did a pretty thorough job of covering the story of Google and its founders through post-IPO. That’s something I’ve been meaning to read about, and this was really worth it.
Anyway, there’s still plenty to read by Paul Graham. If you don’t already know, this Lisp advocate wrote what is now Yahoo! Store, arguably one of the first web applications, back in 1995. He wrote a book last year called Hackers and Painters. As a philosopher, he answers questions like, Why don’t more painters have hacking jobs?