All posts by rbowen

You get what you expect, sometimes

I’ve had several confirmations in the last 24 hours of my belief that conferences – or lots of things, I guess – tend to deliver, to some extent, what you expect them to. I go to OSCon expecting to meet a bunch of people excited about Open Source code and community, and I almost always find them. The few people that I meet who are obviously there to see how they can exploit the community for their own ends, I tend to disregard. Likewise, while many people seem to view the Foo Camp phenomenon as a largely self-congratulatory event, it seems that the people who go there expecting to find community cooperation and real progress, find it.

I’m not talking about deceiving oneself, or the power of positive thinking – at least, I don’t think I am – but it certainly is the case that your attitude has a lot of effect on whether you’re able to make the best of a situation, or whether you sit smugly back and nitpick the folks that don’t quite Get It. If those folks are the ones that you expect to see there, you’ll tend to focus on them, rather than simply ignoring them, as they deserve.

The Cat’s Pajamas

I read most of The Cat’s Pajamas on the way back from San Francisco. Ray Bradbury is one of the great authors of our time. I expect I’ve mentioned that before. Some very good stuff in here, drawn from more than 50 years of his short stories. (Not republished stuff, just things that he had laying around.)

I fear, however, as Mr Bradbury gets older, and even more so once he has passed on, we’ll see a lot of cast-off short stories getting published, and this will finally rather water down his good name. After all, he has written a story almost every day for the last 70 years or so, apparently.

Imagemaps and 1993

The year was 1993. I was a grad student at UK, and I was putting up my first web site. I had seen image maps on other web sites, but I didn’t really know how to make them work on my own site. So, I poked around Usenet looking for useful information, and I used the rudimentary web search tools that were available at the time. Webcrawler, if I recall correctly. I found Vivek Khera, who had written something called imagemap.cgi, which was a server-side imagemap handler.

Of course, being a clueless newbie, I could not get it working, and had do bother Dr. Khera to help me get it working. I don’t expect that he remembers this – I’m sure I was one of a horde of clueless newbies that took up his time. But he helped me get the darned thing working, and was one of the many important forces that moved me on a path to webby stuff.

So, yesterday, I received notification that he had signed my GPG key, and I suddenly made the connection. We had met at OSCon, and I didn’t make the connection there.

So, a public Thank You to Vivek, and to all of the other folks that helped a clueless newbie 10 years ago. I would not be where I am right now (in a very cold conference room for an ApacheCon planners meeting) without your help.

On the way to San Francisco

I’m supposed to be arriving in San Franciscon in about 10 minutes, but I suspect that it will be a little more like an hour.

In Lexington, I thought I had lucked out. At the terminal, they said that I could get an earlier flight to Atlanta, and possibly an earlier flight to San Francisco. However, after sitting on the runway for a little while, we returned to the gate and ended up leaving somewhat later than the later flight was supposed to leave. Something about “a lot of weather in Atlanta.”

Upon arriving in Atlanta, I had to board my second flight almost right away, but then we ended up sitting out on the runway for more than an hour waiting for the weather to go away, then, moving at a slow walk down the runway behind the other 48 flights that were waiting for the weather to go away.

So, now I’m most of the way to San Francisco. I left my little neck pillow at home, so now I have a very sore neck after dosing off for a while. Bah.

Also, I thought there would be an opportunity to buy some dinner on the flight, but apparently I was mistaken.

Remember when they used to serve dinner on these flights, with silverware? And it was included in the price of the ticket? Remember when they stopped charging for the headphones for watching the movies? Remember when flying was fun? Yeah, I do too.

Reactionary politics bad

I find this sort of reactionary politics very distressing. Elections that are won on the platform of “I’m not the other guy” invariably put people in office who stand for very little, and accomplish very little, and excuse it with “at least I’m not the other guy.”

I don’t buy the idea that a change of president is going to fix anything. The mess that we are in appears to be the result of poorly-considered reactions to 9/11, but it certainly seems that these things are institutionalized to such a degree that simply changing the president is not going to make a whole lot of difference. You think that a new president can roll back the stuff that John Ashcroft has done? Apparently, the bulk of the populace thinks that it’s a Good Thing. You think that we can simply pack up and leave Iraq? We’ve not done that yet in any country where we have a military presence.

I guess that I’ve come to feel, to a greater and greater extent, what one of my British friends once told me – no matter who you vote for, the politicians will get in.

Note that I’m really not endorsing either one of the candidates. When I have to choose, I’ll likely vote for the incompetent with experience, rather than the one without. I simply don’t buy this “change is necessarily good” mumbo jumbo, and the “anyone but Bush” camp seems to have skipped one too many history classes.

More about great hackers

I’ve hired a few great hackers. In general, it is very hard to get them to work on things that they’re not interested in. However, if you can spark their interest, you can persuade them to give you better work than you are paying them for. This is a very difficult balance to maintain.

Now, I certainly don’t claim to be a great hacker. But, when working on projects that are uninteresting to me, my burnout rate is very fast. But I’m also disciplined enough to keep plodding on. I’m doing an upgrade now – roughly 200 machines from NT to XP, and RAM in about 600 machines. This is not exciting work. But I keep doing it because it’s what I’m getting paid to do. And, after all, my job is what I do in order to pay for the part of my life that matters.

The thing is, I think that this is what Paul Graham is saying. He’s speaking both to employers and to the hackers themselves, about the good and bad parts of hiring “hackers.” They will produce quality work, but they are harder to motivate, because very few business problems are interesting. On the other side, if you’re one of those folks, get over yourself and learn to work under those conditions, or learn to look for another job. The days of the “rock star” programmer are long gone, and folks need to adjust.

Does the “hacker ethos” need to go away? Of course not. It is very valuable. But it needs to be tempered with a sober understanding no job is exciting all the time, and many are never exciting, but you’re not being hired for your own personal amusement, but for the benefit of a capitalist economy, and one business in particular. For the rare Great Hacker that gets to work on fun stuff all the time, relish it, because it won’t last.

Now, there are some things in the article that I disagree with, and many of these things are put in there *specifically* to pander to a particular audience. The whole “python programmers are smart, java programmers are dolts” thread that runs through it is both unnecessary and false. After all, a Great Hacker should be language-blind, right? The “get your hacker a nicer office” bit is a nice sentiment, but grossly self-serving, and simply impractical in most organizations. Treating programmers like rock stars went out with the dot-bomb, and isn’t coming back. It was really nice while it lasted, and some of us have fond memories.

On the whole, I’m not really sure who the target audience for this article is. If it is managers, it will largely get ignored. “Yeah, nice, but I’m not treating my programmers like superstars or spoiled children.” If it is the hackers themselves, then it needs to emphasize that not all of the character traits that he is discussing are *good* things, and some of them may be worth trying to change or adapt. If this is merely a psychological character study, then I think it’s pretty much right on.

What I guess I’m still not entirely clear on is why people are reacting quite so negatively towards the article. I need to read more of these reactions. I have a suspicion that the anti-Java sentiments in the article are spurring a lot of the negative reactions to be more negative than they would be otherwise.

Great Hackers

While various people are asserting that Paul Graham’s paper Great Hackers is wrong-minded, I have to say that the talk at OSCon, from which it was derived, was one of the better things going at OSCon. Granted, a large part of his audience was the Great Hackers of whom he spoke. I don’t actually have time right now either to read the entire thing, or to figure out why so many people think that he’s wrong. But those of you who were not at his talk might be interested in reading at least the introduction to what he’s saying. I think he makes some brilliant points. And I particularly like his introduction:

I didn’t mean to make the book controversial. I was trying to make it efficient. I didn’t want to waste people’s time telling them things they already knew. It’s more efficient just to give them the diffs. But I suppose that’s bound to yield an alarming book.

(See Feedster for some of the remarks being made on this topic.)