I've spent nearly ten years of my life building something that's too big.

I've done a lot of thinking about this — more than you would probably guess. It's occupied a large part of my technical thinking for the past four or five years, and has helped shaped everything I've written in that time, both in blogs and in code.

For the rest of this little rant, I'm going to assume that you're a young, intelligent, college age or even high school age student interested in becoming a better programmer, perhaps even a great programmer.