Whenever someone asks:
I can only see this one thing different our setups, do you think it could be the cause of our different behaviour?
you don't need to read anymore, just point them to this page immediately. Virtualization for the win.
Hofstadter's law by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
The trivial takes a few hours.
The easy takes a week.
And what seemed hard takes a few hours.
As "deadlines" approach, feature sets get cut down, then there are delays, and finally a feasible feature set is delivered some time after the deadline.
The only deadlines that can be met are those of tasks which have already been done but not announced.
This is of course Hofstadter's law.
On the other hand, as a colleague of Ciro once mentioned, it is also known that the time it takes for a task to be done expands without limits to match the deadline. And therefore, without deadlines, tasks will take forever and never get done.
And so, in a moment, perceiving this paradox, Ciro was enlightened.
Brooks's law by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
The Misty Mountains Cold Scene from The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)
Source.
I will take each and every one of these dwarves over an army from the Iron Hills. For when I called upon them they answered. Loayalty. Honour. And willing heart. I can ask no more than that.
Working remotely is hard if you don't already highly master the software and enterprise systems used.
Also you don't feel people's love as strongly, and usefulness is built on love, see also Steve Jobs's Pixar office space design philosophy.
But please, give workers a small silent office so that we can concentrate instead of a silly open space, and create an internal social network so people can see what others are doing.
Remote working is much better if the majority of the team also does it, otherwise you will get excluded. Maybe after VR...
Keep debug notes by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
When debugging complex software, make sure to keep notes of every interesting find you make in a note file, as you extract it from the integrated development environment or debugger.
Especially if your memory sucks like Ciro's.
This is incredibly helpful in fully understanding and then solving complex bugs.
Ciro Santilli believes that there is a positive correlation between being a software engineer and liking Buddhist-like things.
Maybe it is linked to minimalism and DRY, which software engineers value so greatly.
Even Ciro had to try an unoriginal Buddhist joke intro in one of this Stack Overflow answers.
Ciro also feels that his "minimal reproducible example" scientific language/concept learning method obsession of breaking things into tiny sub-problems has a strong link with Koans.
Some notable Buddhism/programmer examples:
Another thing that points the correlation out is the existence of wattsalan.github.io/ on a github.io about Alan Watts.
Aaron Swartz by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Aaron, Ciro Santilli will complete your quest to make eduction free. Just legally this time, with the and with the Creative Commons license you helped to create.
Ciro likes how The Internet's Own Boy (2014) explains how Aaron felt like high school was bullshit, and that he could learn whatever he wanted from books, which is one of Ciro's key feelings.
It also mentions how he was a natural teacher from a very early age.
gwern.net by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
One thing that annoys Ciro Santilli about that website are the footnote overload. Ciro likes linear things.
Richard Stallman by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
TODO find the best source for the amazing "I have done your mother" quote.
Figure 1.
Richard Stallman
. Source.
Video 1.
Richard Stallman saying "I've never installed gnu/linux"
. Source.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact