You know, the last few times I've read this, I've focused on the wonder of making an unauthorized project happen inside a large organization on the strength of

You know, the last few times I've read this, I've focused on the wonder of making an unauthorized project happen inside a large organization on the strength of personal vision and a generally untapped reserve of goodwill towards something that had clear value (and a little extra caché). But this time, I noticed the commentary about how good software isn't just about the primary developers: "we couldn't get it done alone. Creating sophisticated software requires a team effort.... Making software that is simultaneously easy to learn, easy to use, friendly, useful, and powerful takes people with an incredible combination of skills, talent, and artistry working together with intensity and patience. Greg and I could do the core engineering, but that was a far cry from creating a finished product. "Among other things, we needed ...[1]... professional quality assurance (QA), the difficult and time-consuming testing that would show us the design flaws and implementation bugs we couldn't see in our own work ...[2]... help writing software to draw the three-dimensional images that our software produced. "My skunkworks project was beginning to look real with help from these professionals as well as others in graphic design, documentation, programming, mathematics, and user interface. The secret to programming is not intelligence, though of course that helps. It is not hard work or experience, though they help, too. "The secret to programming is having smart friends." (heavily edited for emphasis)