

Who's Your Arch-Enemy? - bdfh42
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001246.html

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patio11
I for one was ecstatic the first time someone declared me their archnemesis.
If I had a moustache, I would have twirled it.

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jackchristopher
It's a valid approach but there's a danger in becoming attached to the
"antiness". Your defining yourself in the negative when you could just focus
on being better.

It's implicit in building an alternative that you think the current tools
aren't good. Defining yourself relative to a competitor suggests you're
worrying about them; a sign of weakness. I try not to think in those terms,
and that shifts the goal from, "let's beat x" to "do better". It's better to
think of your "competitor" as you.

Thinking outside of terms the mentality of "competition" is definitely hard.
But I try to keep in mind that everyone is doing the best they can with what
they have; I look for the win-win.

When Garry Kasparov plays a new player, he doesn't think about winning, he
just tries to play a great game of chess.

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biohacker42
Atwood just ensured this article will show up high in any Google search for
expert's exchange.

As much as I'm not sure if his writing is really helpful to good software
engineers, I applaud him and Joel for taking on expert's exchange.

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jreposa
We're like BankRate.com but with actual bank rates.
<http://www.mybanktracker.com/>

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unalone
Arch-enemies give you focus. They show you what you're _not_ trying to do (if
you're trying to be your archenemy find something new to do where you can
contribute); they give you a public face you can battle against; they give you
a reason to want to improve yourself.

If you _are_ the enemy people want to fight, spare no prisoners. The Evil
Overlord list (<http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html>) will help
you immensely.

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sachinag
Yeah, we tried to ignore GameStop for such a long time, but then decided to
say "screw it" and have just gone full bore against them:
[http://blog.dawdle.com/2009/03/why-penny-arcade-is-wrong-
abo...](http://blog.dawdle.com/2009/03/why-penny-arcade-is-wrong-about-
gamestop.html)

And we're doing a little guerrilla marketing at GDC on Thursday. Should be
fun.

 _twirls mustache_ (take _that_ , patio11)

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dinkumthinkum
More drivel posted by Atwood. News at 11. Seriously, Atwood is so passe at
this point. He doesn't post any original ideas, only posts about other posts
he has written or has seen somewhere else. It's hard to call much of his
entries "writing" as they are more just "quoting with bolding." I'd reckon if
you took all the text from his post, the ratio of non-quoted to quoted text
would be about 20% and probably about 50% of that is just paraphrasing what
was quoted.

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berntb
Personally, my Arch Enemy is the first CD... "Black Earth" is really a
favorite. I didn't find the later stuff that exiting, even if Angela growls
like two men.

:-)

Edit: It's ok if you mod the stupid joke down. The article did deserve better.
(I couldn't resist, AE is a favorite. When tired with a deadline I don't
listen to my jazz/singer-songwriter CDs.)

