Designer, implementor, user, writer A Fragment by Donald Knuth dl.acm.org Thus, I came to the conclusion that the designer of a new system must not only be the implementor and the first large-scale user; the designer should also write the first user manual. The separation of any of these four components would have hurt TeX significantly. If I had not participated fully in all these activities, literally hundreds of improvements would never have been made, because I would never have thought of them or perceived why they were important. Eating your own dog food making
Its place in the web of nature This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it. Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein & Sara Ishikawa, A Pattern Language Crafting repair imakingnature