I’m not typically a big joel fan, for reasons I’ve probably listed before, but if you’re a college or high school student and reading this, drop whatever else you are doing and read this right now. It is great, really great advice on what you should do in college if you want to be a successful programmer after graduation.
In a related vein, Joel has two pieces (particular the second one) that capture perfectly why the old desktop group (particularly during the Sun and XD2 periods) were such a pleasure to work with- we were a bunch of cantankerous bastards, but in the end, basically every team member was ‘rosh gadol’ and not ‘rosh katan’.