Farls: Hackers in the Bazaar

I completely understand nerding out about stuff. I feel like everyone has about something or other at some point in their life. When I was younger, it was Nintendo. I thought I was so cool because I knew all of the history and could recite all of this info about the different console generations and stuff, always finding myself reading books and watching YouTube videos to learn more. Nowadays, it's a cappella. Since I'm music directing for my group this year, I've become fixated on music theory, watching other groups' arrangements to try and incorporate some of those ideas into my own. I feel like it's important to be passionate about something , especially a hobby that gives you a creative outlet as a distraction from work. "This is after the divorce. Dad lives in another part of Helsinki. He thinks his kids should have more than one interest, so he signs you up for basketball, his favorite sport." I try my best to never be quick to judge people I meet be...

I'm so washed. It's so joever. Every morning I wake up and tell myself that I have all of this free time to work on a personal project or read a few articles about a new release, and every night I lie awake in bed hating myself for attempting neither. While I do keep my schedule pretty busy, I always wonder how hackers have motivation, and time, outside of school or work to contribute to projects for fun. "What we see implied in hacker ownership customs is a Lockean theory of property rights in one subset of the noosphere, the space of all programs. Hence `homesteading the noosphere', which is what every founder of a new open-source project does." While I've never really contributed to an open-source project, I never would think to do so just so I can claim partial "ownership" of the service. I don't think this is what ESR was getting at, either, but I was interested in how much of this essay was dedicated to defining this concept. I have always ...

  The first question that comes to mind: why not both? I'm assuming this is probably a popular take, as each model is appropriate for different scenarios, but I think it's healthy to understand and respect both concepts  and where their application is most effective. " It may well turn out that one of the most important effects of open source's success will be to teach us that play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work." Over my past two internships (same company) I worked with a small team of about four developers, including myself. Our work was very bazaar-style: code being passed around with no real structure. We followed the Agile methodology, but relatively loosely. It was the perfect situation for our team. Since there were only a few of us working on a much larger project, it would not have made sense to implement a top-down approach. Especially since our Project Manager had no real development experience (a former IT employee internally ...

Ahh, the classic "how do I speedrun retirement" conversation we had a few weeks ago. Startups do  seem like a "get rich quick" scheme...if you do it right. Find a gap, start to fill it, and (hopefully) get bought. While there aren't any rules on what one is  or is not  allowed to pursue, the wealth that comes with developing technology has most definitely polluted the waters with more "robots," leaving fewer True Hackers. "When people care enough about something to do it well, those who do it best tend to be far better than everyone else." I read Outliers  by Malcolm Gladwell for a class in high school and ever since, the 10,000 hour rule has always stuck with me: all of the pros have put at least 10,000 hours into perfecting their craft. The  Beatles played 10000 hours worth of practices/gigs together before they solidified themselves as greats. Bill Gates spent 10,000 hours tinkering with computers to fully understand them. While I don'...

" Consider Cobol." I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT COBOL IS. Maybe this is a me problem, but this language was referenced way too many times for me to draw any meaning from those points. Also, it's been a little weird trying to wrap my head around 2003 Python. I'm assuming it's a much different (younger) language than it is today. "The reason Latin won't get you a job is that no one speaks it. If you write in Latin, no one can understand you. But Lisp is a computer language, and computers speak whatever language you, the programmer, tell them to." I've always wondered what the real  difference between languages was aside from use-case. Why isn't there one language that can do everything  well? I guess that's what Python aims to do, especially with its massive support as an open-source language. As Graham stated, you should always use the most powerful language or, if this doesn't best fit your use-case, find the one with the greatest library supp...

Reading Graham's essays were honestly such a breath of fresh air. This dude is writing exactly what I'm thinking--I completely resonate with his perception of the hacker and, more importantly, what the hacker sets out to do. "And then at the other extreme you have the hackers, who are trying to write interesting software, and for whom computers are just a medium of expression, as concrete is for architects or paint for painters. It's as if mathematicians, physicists, and architects all had to be in the same department." If anything, these writings make hacking more  desirable. When I was a senior in high school, my teachers would (naturally) ask me what I wanted to study in undergrad. "Computer science." They would laugh, "there's no world in which you sit in a cubicle and write code all day--you talk too much." I took this as a compliment. For context: I was a theater kid. While I've always enjoyed being a creative-type, there was, and...