For three years now I’ve been running a small software business in my spare time. It has been a very educational experience, especially in showing me that many things we think we know about software, programming, business, and the like are wrong. This is a bit of a shock, especially for well-worn chestnuts which have intuitive appeal, which we have come to invest with moral significance, and (most importantly, because we all think we’re smart) we’ve believe so self-evidently true as to make investigation a waste of time.