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Reading 09: Birth of a Nerd OS

Linus Torvalds is one of those guys who doesn’t get enough recognition from the general public in my opinion. If I were to ask my business major friends if they knew who he was, I’m fairly confident that maybe 5-10% of them would know. So what makes Linus’ story different from household names like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates? And don’t get me wrong, I think that Linus is a household name in many homes -- but if I’m being honest I didn’t know who he was until I got to college (oops). However I think this is a good segway into some differences in Linus’ and my own upbringing. I am sure that if I was exposed to computer science, programming, and hacking at a young age then I would have known who Linus was before college. However, the first time I thought about computer science was my junior year of high school when my pre-calc teacher suggested that I take AP Computer Science. Linus had a childhood resembling that of most “hacker/geek” childhoods. His upbringing is very relatable to many --
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Reading 08: No subscription needed

If we brought the debate of open source versus closed source and freedom versus proprietary to the early True Hackers, there is no doubt that they would be appalled at commercial software. However, ask someone like Bill Gates who made their wealth off of software and you’ll get a much different answer. So where is this line drawn? Is there even a line to be drawn? Is software more valuable as open or closed source? Should I start selling my sophomore year Data Structures final project as proprietary software? Probably not, to that last question. I personally think that ESR’s view of services instead of software makes sense… if you are fully dedicated to the open source model. I think that if companies are going to sell software related products, it would be best in the eyes of open source advocates if those companies did run with the service instead of software model. As ESR says, “If the vendor’s money comes from selling bits, most effort will go into making bits and shoving them
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Reading 07: All together now!

Open source is undoubtedly a large part of the software development world these days. I remember when I first started learning how to program I discovered open source and discovered that there were many software projects and tools that had their code online for anyone to access. My initial reactions were in awe of the millions and millions of lines of code that I had at my disposal to examine and learn from. My next reaction was actually experiencing a little bit of intimidation. I was wondering if I would learn enough to create one of these projects with millions of lines of code -- granted this was before I really knew what the open source community was. As a senior in college I would say I certainly have a better grasp on the culture of open source compared to when I was a high school senior. I know now that that it would be rare for one person alone to make all the contributions to a project, unlike what younger me thought. Older me knows that most often there are many people helpi
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Reading 06: The Cathedral and the Bazaar

There are many analogies for describing the world of software engineering, and I feel like I am constantly learning of new ones. The analogy of the cathedral and the bazaar is one that I think describes two main concepts of software engineering very well. There’s the very structured and very pristine cathedral and there’s the open-source, very collaborative and slightly chaotic bazaar. I think both have their purpose and place in today’s software world, but I believe one will start to emerge as a leader for the future. The cathedral model of software engineering is characterized with planning, vision, and execution. There must be a great design to go off of and a small team of engineers to bring this design to fruition. It is certainly more closed off compared to other styles of software engineering and it is very structured. This is very requirements-driven work. On the other side of the spectrum is the bazaar model, and this is very much the model that represents open-source work.
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Reading 05: $tartups

Where there is technology there is business. Where there is business there is money. Where this is money, well, there is no clue what the best way to get more money is. Ever since the commercialization of hacking there have been many different routes to make money off of one’s hacking. In Paul Graham’s eyes, putting your effort towards startups is the way to make sure that you get rich and get the most money possible. However, all this money has to come from somewhere, and not all of this money can be distributed to others, at least in Graham’s view. So let’s take a dive into Silicon Valley and talk about startups. I think that the prospect of creating my own company frightens me more than entices me. I can certainly see myself wanting move up in management and leadership within a company, but not within a startup. Why I think that it doesn’t entice me is due to mainly the nature of startups -- you put in a lot of effort and often don’t start seeing a profit until years in and the fa
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Reading 04: Let's talk about whitespace (among other things)

As a beginner computer scientist I really was not aware at all of the languages out there. The very first programming language I learned was Java in high school so one could say I was already starting off on the right foot for enterprise programming. Then I began to hear that C and C++ were “staple languages” and that I should definitely learn Python. In Python, however, whitespace was important and when I first heard this I imagined that 5 spaces would mean plus, 3 spaces would mean a string, and 234553423 spaces would prove that NP = P…. in other words I had no clue what that meant. What I did know is that I was learning a new way to express my problem solving capabilities. I was learning to write recipes of sort for common problems (where the recipes were code). I think that this is an important point when it comes to Paul Graham’s idea that “programming languages are not just technology, but what programmers think in”. I was initially surprised that some of these languages I had
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Reading 03: Debugging is not relaxing

Through his essays, Paul Graham paints a similar yet slightly different picture of what hackers are compared to Steven Levy. Graham uses the analogy of painting to describe hackers -- “What hackers and painters have in common is that they’re both makers… what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things.” (Graham 18). In this sense, Graham’s hackers are similar to Levy’s hackers as they both are create hacks and building things, whether it be an assembler or new modern software. However where Graham starts to show his differences with hackers is right in the first essay, Why Nerds Are Unpopular. Although he never explicitly says hackers are nerds in this first essay, it is implied within the context on the essays. Graham brings hacking into a more modernly-relevant light by bringing back memories of junior high school and the classic comparison of the nerds versus the popular kids. “There is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd”, and of course us hacke
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