I found this great post on Three Things I Learned About Software WHILE NOT in College, a response to another blogger’s Three Things I Learned About Software in College. It sounded fun, so I thought I’d chime in with my own observations.

Three things I learned while in college

1. You can spend hours getting a really neato-keen solution working and not finish in time, or you do something the obvious and easy way. Guess which gets the better grade?
2. College professors are full of “back in my day” stories. Many haven’t seen the real world in years.
3. You get a lot more out of things (in this case, college) when you pay for them yourself.

Three things I learned while NOT in college

1. The health and success of the project is more important than your ego. You can argue for your way until you’re blue in the face, then go home and celebrate your victory alone, or concede that other people have good ideas too and celebrate a successful project together.
2. The perfect is the enemy of the good. If you have two options, A and B, and B will take an hour longer to do, and you spend half an hour successfully arguing to do A, you have gained nothing. If you have an algorithm that takes 15 minutes to implement and will save 2 minutes of CPU time over the next five years, you have gained nothing. *
3. 25% of your time should be spent planning what to do for the next 75%. This includes design after design after design until you get it right.

* If I weren’t trying to stick to the limit of three things, I’d add another item here that ties into #2: CPU time is infinitely cheaper than programmer time.

Now, some of my favorites from other people:

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The Borders in Oakbrook has a computer history section. Well, shelf really.

The OpenID plugin I was using for Wordpress here hadn’t been updated in a while, so I surfed around to see if there was a new version out yet. It appears that someone kind of forked the project and improved it, so now I have better support for OpenID here. You can use a URL or even an i-name as your OpenID identifier.

Why would you want an OpenID? Check out this slideshow on The Implications of OpenID. Watch this video:

“But Dave,” you’re probably thinking, “where do I get an OpenID?” Why, you’ve had an OpenID all along. All you had to do is click your heels together three times, and say “there’s no place like…” Actually, if you use AOL (or even their instant messenger) or LiveJournal, you have an OpenID. There are other sites out there, but those are two of the big names.

While googling for an “openid shirt”, I came across a blog entry entitled OpenID: Too many providers, not enough consumers, which makes a very good point. Several companies have recently announced that they’re getting in on the OpenID bandwagon. But what they’re really saying is that they’re giving their users a URL so they can use their existing account as an OpenID elsewhere. AOL wont let you log into Instant Messenger with an OpenID account from another provider. However, they’ll gladly give you an OpenID URL once you’ve given them a bunch of info about yourself and let them count you among their subscriber base.

Kudos to 37 Signals for integrating OpenID consumer support into their apps, but not bothering with provider support for now.

And I never did find an OpenID shirt, btw.