Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

12 Apr 2006, 15:42 p.m.

Why Do I Want To Type His Name "Ynggve"?

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2006 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

My favorite writer this month: Steve Yegge.

Update: I know I already mentioned Yegge. Here's an excuse to mention him again:

Paul Graham has to be that way. Not just because he's a rich bastard who (with two friends) implemented an application in Lisp that we've been unable to match at Amazon, and Yahoo bought him out for $40 million in stock that proceeded to soar. That's not the main reason he comes off the way he does, although as far as I'm concerned, it gives him at least a halfway decent excuse.

Paul comes off the way he does because he's good at marketing, and he realizes that in a world full of egotistical programmers, the only way to be heard in all the noise is to be an arrogant bastard. ....

We work in a fashion industry, and marketing really matters.