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Reading 11: King of the Ball

Most tech stories follow a normal march towards glory. Plenty of people seek money or fame, but Linus Torvalds’ motivations remained pure when developing one of the most influential projects ever created. Despite personal hardships, an aggressive industry, and unexpected success, Linus led Linux to serve as a testament to how innovation, community, and timing can converge to create something monumental. When a personal project transitions into a worldwide phenomenon overnight, there are bound to be growing pains. My favorite, rather ridiculous growing pain is the online fan reactions Linus describes from 1996. When news of Linus and his wife expecting a child was leaked, Linus explains how vocal Linux community members expected some planning as to how he would handle his new obligations and Linux. Later that year, when the time came for Linus to graduate and get a job, he received similar reactions from fans concerned over the project’s future. The reactions of community members hold s...
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Reading 10: Birth of a Nerd OS

Reading about Linus’s obsession with computers and programming at a young age is laughably similar to how I grew up. While Linus had his grandfather introduce him to his Commodore Vic 20, I had my older brother hand off his Gameboy SP with a copy of Pokémon Emerald to me. I could barely read the dialogue when I first booted it up, but that did little to stop me from trying. After my first taste of video games, I was hooked for life. That little influence created a life-long interest in games and computers, culminating in my choice of computer science for a major. Although I had a little more variation in extra-curriculars and hobbies, I would confidently say I spent enough hours behind a computer to qualify as a geek as a kid. It is pretty cool to know that Linus started from a similar path and created a project that is so impactful in the world today. I found Linus’s note about finding interesting classes easy and others loathsome to be particularly relatable. I had an especially ha...
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Reading 09: The Magic Cauldron

 When I first heard of open-source software, I thought that it sounded a little too good to be true. Free, high-quality software had to have some sort of scam behind it that funded its unbelievable premise. In this week’s reading, The Magic Cauldron , Eric S. Raymond (ESR) discusses the economic viability of open-source software.  He describes its success as an “implausible form of magic” where “high quality software materializes for free”, but how can such a financial model support itself? Is it all too good to be true? ESR argues for a “services instead of software” business model for open-source software, wherein by making software free, developers can “force us into that service-fee–dominated world—and to expose what a relatively weak prop the sale value of the secret bits in closed-source software was all along” ( The Magic Cauldron ). ESR argues that open-source work providing services hold more value than selling proprietary software. This model thrives in sectors whe...
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Reading 08: The Noosphere

When I talk to friends and family about software these days, the main idea that gets circulated is the sheer value in the industry. The wealth that companies have generated with software in the last 20 years makes it rather obvious as to why, but this lovely motivation does not exist at the center of all software communities. In this week’s readings, Eric S. Raymond (ESR) describes how the unique world of open-source software is upheld not by money, but by a unique “gift culture”, social norms, and personal motivation. ESR explains open-source software as having “no serious shortage of the `survival necessities'—disk space, network bandwidth, computing power. Software is freely shared.” So, if there is are no resources or monetary gains to compete for, why would you contribute to open-source software? For open-source programmers, a main motivation became the reputation they could earn amongst their peers. This reputation is a self-satisfying reward on its own, but it quickly snow...
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Reading 07: The Cathedral and the Bazaar

  In The Cathedral and the Bazaar , Eric S. Raymond (ESR) explores two distinct software development models: the cathedral and the bazaar. ESR describes the cathedral as “carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time”. ESR saw this approach to development as better for more complex problems, such as the larger tools he had developed in the 90’s, and it encompasses much of what I have seen in my short tenure as a software developer in the real world. For every project I have worked on, there has been a project lead with (mostly) absolute power over its process and result. In my experience, the cathedral model has been effective at keeping teams on task, but it also keeps the project rigid in scope and prevents some great ideas from coming to fruition. I see less collaborations between teams with reasonably consistent results. ESR describes the bazaar model of software development as “a gre...
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Reading 06: Wealth Creation

The three essays by Paul Graham that we read this week certainly had some interesting takes on startups and wealth. The way he describes startups appears incredibly frightening to someone who is considering all job prospects nearing graduation, like myself. While most of Graham's writings on startups focus on the people and innovations that make them successful, he does highlight how  "there is a large random factor in the success of any company" (How to Make Wealth, Graham). When talking about the downsides of startups, Graham describes their approach to business as similar to a mosquito. These companies risk shutdown to make as many jumps and leaps as possible to strive for more success, cutting corners and making rash decisions all over. This seems like common knowledge, but Graham drives home just how luck-based it can be. Viaweb evidently came close to failure several times, even with a risk-adverse approach to business. In today's world, however, Graham claims t...
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Reading 04: Nerds and Hackers

 Despite a 20-year gap between Steve Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and Paul Graham’s series of essays on hackers, their writings are remarkably similar. They use different language, different ideas, and different lived experiences to describes “hackers” in their time, yet both works clearly describe the same kind of person. In “Why Nerds Are Unpopular”, Graham describes his upbringing and how he felt as a “nerd” in school. He found that nerds usually shared the same story: They were intelligent, unpopular, and had a certain drive for knowledge. While most kids spent a lot of time trying to climb the social ladder, nerds typically cared more for learning and exploring. Nerds did not necessarily want to be unpopular, but their other interests were always more important. These characteristics are the exact story that Levy relays in Hackers for many of the kids at MIT and Stanford. These notorious early hackers all describe how they took apart electronics, dug i...
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