Aspiring Hackerness
Friday, July 30, 2004
I aspire to great hackerness. I want to hack and hack well. How can I best do that? Is hacking just technoslang for being anti-authoritarian with code instead of paint cans? Or is it something more, something with even a whiff of nobility to it, a dedication to programming as an art and not just a means to an end? An actual end in and of itself - programming for the sake of programming - is an incredibly powerful idea, one I am still just coming to grips with.
This rant co-sponsored by Paul Graham's recent essay, "
Great Hackers", and the
websandiego message boards (and now RSS feed!) where I came across it. His original "
Hackers and Painters" was similarly inspiring, re-igniting a fiery love of coding that I hadn't felt since high school, after which I bought my first laptop, making sure it was a Mac
just so I could better learn php and whip out a monster redesign of
my portfolio website. Although the tide has subsided while adjusting to my new(ish) day job these last few months and my php skills have been barely utilized so far, two important, irrefutable points still arise: 1) that won't be for long, I'll be diving back into that stuff for the incoming undergrads in Sept, and 2) I wouldn't even have this position if I hadn't had the nascent php skills I developed during those passionate two months of coding. Just before I was hired, the candidate field for this job was narrowed down between myself and a more traditional software engineer, a typical CS programmer type, and if I hadn't rounded out my usability and design skills with programming, I highly doubt I would have landed it. I barely squeaked by as it was, what with usability and design still being as undervalued as always, no matter how important I think they are.
Now the time has arrived to make that kind of hacking a permanent lifestyle choice, to no longer code grad student-style - whenever I feel like it, in giant spurts - and instead to hopefully grow up and fully step into my geek robes, to program responsibly, efficiently, reliably, quickly, powerfully, amazingly, continuously, progressively... Paul's latest essay feels like another drop of fuel in this direction. Any fairly smart geek can sit down and crank out for a short while - doing it everyday is another matter.
Coming down from my lofty soapbox to more practical matters, I also need to learn how to do the little things well so that the people around me stay in touch and don't lose patience while I develop. Work people or non-work people, it doesn't matter. It doesn't help to go off into a cave while you work - this whole profession is about building tools, yes, but tools for
people to use, not works of art to be stared at in a glass case.