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The "moral of the story" is hidden in a non-linebreaking long paragraph formatted as pseudocode. Most of the content of the essay is there, yet you can't read i

The "moral of the story" is hidden in a non-linebreaking long paragraph formatted as pseudocode. Most of the content of the essay is there, yet you can't read it unless you think to inspect the source code. You probably missed or didn't take the time: --- System.out.println (“ It's not easy being an African software developer. Don't give up and always Ask God for directions. Use the right technologies for the right tasks. The future of the African software industry lies in enabling the scattered bunches of individual hobbyist programmers. Those people who would be coding even if it didn't pay because that is what they like doing. People like that should be given a chance, should be given work to do, encouraged to stick it out. When there are enough programmers around and working as a programmer is a viable occupation that can buy a car and build a house, the industry will have grown up. Until then, it is dog eat dog -- monkey go work, baboon go chop... “); ------- ... I really want to find something positive to say.

nixpulvis 8y ago
This is why we need to be supporting open and free hardware, everything else is some form of compromise. EDIT: Kodos for the moral, I'm on mobile and couldn't read it since the formatting is a little off, and my iPhone can't easily inspect element. See what I mean?
- arcticbull 8y ago
  Skimming, the salient point to me was that the perspective of people there is "hardware comes in a box" rather than (in my words) "coming from the ingenuity and hard work of engineers, who are just normal people with experience in building things." It's easy to overlook, though I can point to that moment for myself when I realized this was something I loved doing: 10-year-old me going to a camp where they showed us how we could use qbasic plus some breadboards to build security systems, launch rockets, make a musical instrument -- with electronics. That's what showed me both that people make it, and that I could make it too. Whether hardware is totally open or not, if you don't have that spark, the moment that connection forms, it doesn't matter. The technology that got me going was far from open, ti was some 1990s era Compaq with a parallel port break-out most likely. I think Arduinos are 10X more powerful for getting people into this world than an open computer they couldnt even begin to understand. That's learning to sprint before you can crawl. Both matter, though.

nixpulvis 8y ago

This is why we need to be supporting open and free hardware, everything else is some form of compromise. EDIT: Kodos for the moral, I'm on mobile and couldn't read it since the formatting is a little off, and my iPhone can't easily inspect element. See what I mean?

arcticbull 8y ago
Skimming, the salient point to me was that the perspective of people there is "hardware comes in a box" rather than (in my words) "coming from the ingenuity and hard work of engineers, who are just normal people with experience in building things." It's easy to overlook, though I can point to that moment for myself when I realized this was something I loved doing: 10-year-old me going to a camp where they showed us how we could use qbasic plus some breadboards to build security systems, launch rockets, make a musical instrument -- with electronics. That's what showed me both that people make it, and that I could make it too. Whether hardware is totally open or not, if you don't have that spark, the moment that connection forms, it doesn't matter. The technology that got me going was far from open, ti was some 1990s era Compaq with a parallel port break-out most likely. I think Arduinos are 10X more powerful for getting people into this world than an open computer they couldnt even begin to understand. That's learning to sprint before you can crawl. Both matter, though.