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I love finding little ideas that I can put away in a box and remember later to guide my way. This is why I like 37signals’ idea for establishing product vision.

Here’s one: write code so expressive it requires very few comments.  In Coding Without Comments, Jeff Atwood points out that seasoned programmers, in general, adhere closely to this statement.  Grasshoppers, meanwhile, are still picking up their chops.  They need comments to support their funky constructs.

This line of thinking reveals something deep about computer programming: a programming language is a real language.  Compare writing in a programming language to writing in, say, Spanish.  Could you imagine resorting to English in side notes, to explain what was going on in the body, simply because your Spanish was so bad that it would be difficult to understand otherwise?

Right now, starting a business means learning to program in Objective-C using Cocoa, looking for office space, and hiring employees / partners.  Hmm, “partner”.  Maybe I should use that in the next listing.

Hiring is difficult—and critical.  Given my choice, I would definitely give the other two a back seat to hiring a kickin’ Cocoa developer with great UI skills.  But, where are these people?  Hiring is hard.

The other two are going pretty well, happily.  We’re not going to move into super awesome office space, but then, we are pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps!  We won’t attract certain people—those that want to work in swanky office space and make a swanky salary.  But guess what?  That is a selfish daydream that doesn’t help anyone build a profitable company.

As for learning Objective-C and Cocoa, how could that go badly?  I am no Apple fan boy, but the OS X development platform is amazing.  Hats off the the platform company.

Oh, starting a business means one other thing, too:  excitement!  This is going to be fun.  If I’m lucky, I’ll write about it.