I owe a great deal of my own personal success to Patrick McKenzie and Thomas Ptacek, both of whom have been steadfast, consistent and generous advisors (both in public comments and in "hey can I bounce this off of you" emails).<p>After following Patrick's writings and stories for a number of years now, I can confidently say that his relentless transparency has been one of the greatest gifts I received in the industry. His advice may not strictly work for everyone in the literal sense, but I believe that diligently attempting to use his suggestions as a template is, itself, a highly productive exercise in programming and business.<p>There is one particular note I want to make about patio11's success: Patrick is a phenomenal marketer with remarkable business savvy who <i>happens to be a programmer.</i> He is <i>not</i> primarily a programmer, which is evidenced by his recent work at Stripe and the work he is best known for on HN (essentially, writing about shipping software, not the software itself).<p>This is not to say he is not a good programmer - I simply can't comment on that, though I have reason to believe he is after seeing Starfighter's game. Rather, he leverages that skill set as a means to an end, not an end in itself.<p>I think this is a really important point to make because I see many people who try to pursue significant career success by e.g. ranking up on TopCoder, or open sourcing impressive software. While those things can lead to success, there is a vast, long tail of people who are very capable programmers with no recognition doing those things. Healthy self-promotion and <i>efficient</i> improvement/maintenance of one's technical skills has a much higher probability of success than attempting to become Fabrice Bellard.<p>This is demonstrative - in my opinion, the sum of all of patio11's advice can be summarized as follows: <i>Don't be a programmer, be a $SOMETHING who happens to program, and program well.</i>