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Reading 11: The senioritis hit for this one

       I find Linus’ success story to be different than that of other tech pioneers that we’ve read about in this class, but not wildly surprising to me either.  When reading about famous and influential people, I often think about the saying “There is a fine line between genius and insanity.”  While this may not literally be true, I think this statement can be revised a bit to say that outsized achievement in one aspect of life may result in (or stem from) a deficiency in another part of life.  I don’t want to overgeneralize like Paul Graham does, but I do think sometimes the giants of society tend to live less balanced lives than the “average” individual.   At first, I thought that it was interesting that Linus seems to care a lot about work-life balance and is transparent about his own flaws in a way that isn’t common among tech leaders.  But then I started to think about his personality, and I realized that his less typical social skills and his self-admitted difficulties with
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Reading 09: Contribute to open source so Apple can take advantage of your hard work!

    I, too, am no Menbroza expert, but I will still attempt to comment on the business aspects of open source in comparison to closed software models.  One thing I found interesting about this reading is ESR’s critique that applying the traditional “factory model” of business to software makes little logical sense and ultimately harms customers.  He makes a good point that most software developers are not writing software that will be sold, and if they are, little of their salary is tied to the value of the sale itself.  Continuous maintenance of the software becomes a large portion of the developer’s work, and is often more important than adding features in terms of maintaining users and increasing customer satisfaction.  But since the business world still views software as a product (at the time of ESR’s writing), sometimes user support is handed off to help desk employees, who may not be able to work as effectively since they are often less skilled and underpaid.  In this way, open
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Reading 08: I definitely didn't forget about this blog post...

    I agree with ESR that a reputation game model (and to some extent, a gift culture) is at play in open source communities, but I don’t think that the majority of people enter open source communities with the goal of winning this game.  The reputation game model can be seen in academic and artistic circles as well, but I disagree with ESR that this is because these fields lack scarcity of a specific tangible resource.  Rather, I think the complicated rules that define and create prestige evolve among communities whose products don’t easily fit into the dominant exchange culture in which we live.  In the case of academic research, the output is intended to be seen and used by many, but truly owned by few.  The same can be true of art pieces that make it into museums.  For art that is sold, like books or film, the user space is so large that one film is rarely in direct economic competition with another.  Maybe this does mean there is no scarcity of things to make movies about.  I also
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Reading 07: How Bazaar!

   When I first read ESR’s distinction between the cathedral and the bazaar methodologies of creating software, I assumed that the bazaar model referred exclusively to open source and the cathedral model was more closely linked to business.  As I thought about it more, however, I thought that the bazaar qualities of delegating specific development tasks to others and releasing new versions as frequently as possible could apply to some software companies as well as open source projects.  Later on in the reading, ESR gives the example of MATLAB, which came to my mind as I was thinking about frequent releases and user bug submissions.  ESR classifies MATLAB as a hybrid model that uses “a cathedral-mode core and a bazaar-mode toolbox”.  While interning at MathWorks, I found this blend a little chaotic due to the never-ending release cycle and the balancing of new features, bug fixes, and internal vs. external goals in each new release.  While MATLAB and Simulink did seem to have lots of de
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Reading 06: Going off Prompt and Over Cause I'm Mad :D

        In these three essays, Paul Graham makes an alarming number of sweeping generalizations about the world without taking his frame of reference into account.  His rationalization of his success in business and of the inequity in our society as natural, good aspects of the world we live in conveniently frees him from any sense of moral responsibility or consideration of the privileges he has enjoyed since birth.  Graham’s attitude in these essays would likely bother the hardware hackers of the 70s that we read about in Levy’s book.  I also find it deeply unsettling, and would like to counter some of Graham’s ill-formed arguments in this response.   One assumption that Graham quickly makes, assuming that the reader will agree, is that higher intelligence directly translates into increased performance in the workplace, and therefore, higher productivity.  Graham moves along this simplistic line, declaring those who are more productive members of society are paid more for their eff
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Reading 05: Yikes, maybe I shouldn't have accepted that Java developer role...

   There are a number of concepts found in other languages that have no real equivalent in English, only approximations.  Inuit and other languages spoken by Native people in the far northern reaches of the globe have over 50 words for different types of snow, and even more for different types of ice.  One of my teachers from high school described her experience of going to buy bananas in Brazil and being astounded by the sheer number of varieties that we do not have in the U.S.  Languages expand in areas that are important to the people who speak them, and evolve over time as needs change and words go in and out of fashion.  Just as the human language that we use fundamentally changes the way that we perceive the world, the programming languages that we choose also influence our thought processes and design choices.    As Graham notes in his essays, programming languages contain syntax for whatever paradigm was all the rage when they were “the” language to program in.  If the language
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Reading 04: Does this mean my hulk.py should be in the Louvre?

   I’m not sure that the “true hackers” of the first section of Levy’s book would appreciate Graham’s comparison of hacking to painting, especially because they rolled their eyes at the model railroad club members who obsessed over painting the tiny train cars and enhancing the scenery around the track.  Regardless, I really liked Graham’s analysis of hacking as an art form in “Hackers and Painters”.  I agree that computer science occupies a category wholly its own, and differs from other engineering or scientific disciplines in that it provides the learner with a toolset that they can use to create beautiful, innovative applications.  A scientist works to uncover truths about our reality, while a hacker invents their own reality or builds software to improve the one in which we live.  This description of the hacker as an artist appeals to me a bit more than Levy’s criteria, especially because it feels more accessible and universal.  Just as anyone can be a painter, writer, or musician
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