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I find it pretty amazing that someone who's been working for 20 years as a mountain guide and spends as much time as possible outdoors picks up an obscure piece
by patrec 6y ago
I find it pretty amazing that someone who's been working for 20 years as a mountain guide and spends as much time as possible outdoors picks up an obscure piece of niche software like Emacs, learns to program in his 40ies and then becomes one of the most significant package contributors, all as a side hobby to his outdoor interests.
- smitty1e 6y agoAbout as expected as the Spanish Inquisition.
- TaylorAlexander 6y agoOpen source is pretty interesting in how it functions and it’s something I really want to understand more deeply.
- creddit 6y agohttps://www.amazon.com/Working-Public-Making-Maintenance-Software/dp/0578675862 https://www.amazon.com/Working-Public-Making-Maintenance-Sof...
- submeta 6y agoThank you for the book suggestion. It was recommended by Guido van Rossum recently: https://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/1297043394712092672 https://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/1297043394712092672
- TaylorAlexander 6y agoGreat! Ordered. Thank you!
- patrec 6y agoWell, or functions not -- sadly. It seems possible that the reason Mr Volpiatto ceased development was because the burnout he had close brushes with before finally caught up with him. My impression is that most open source projects that do not habitually burn their creators are either strategic assets to a handful of multi billion dollar companies, in which case at least core contributors get a normal life and see some actual upside for their work; or part time labors of love of talented individuals who have either not hit the scale where they would need to engage with a large number of users or who are very good at saying No. Even the rare super-elite developers like Zig's Andrew Kelley who manage to get full-time funding for their work via patreon/github don't seem to pull in more than a fraction of what they'd make in normal employment as a single person for their whole project. Open source started out as asymmetrical warfare against The Man (personified to Microsoft) but by now has been mostly co-opted into a form of voluntary self-exploitation to enrich mega-corps. I wonder if there is a way out of that.
- Fordec 6y agoObligatory XKCD https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
- mikorym 6y agoA lot of mathematicians are oddities that by some stroke of luck, or perhaps by consistent switching of hobbies, somehow figure out that they understood the basic premises of mathematics. After all, the issue is that mathematics is simple. Humans don't like simple things. And when humans think they have found simple things they start wars or some novel iteration of discrimination against others.
- nomoreservices 6y ago> Humans don't like simple things. It's amazing how true this is. You can see it very clearly in your day-to-day as a software engineer. The vast majority of people you will encounter in your career favor fancy, complicated solutions to problems that could be easily solved with fewer resources. And yet when you float those ideas, you're laughed at.
- imwillofficial 6y agoMaybe what you think is simple problem isn’t so simple after all... This is the mark of an inexperienced software engineer in my book. Not understanding the true complexity of a given situation. I still catch myself doing it.
- nomoreservices 6y agoI'm a senior engineer with 15 years of experience. Pretty sure I have a good grasp on "complex" vs. "unnecessarily complicated," and I see the latter a lot more than I would like to.
- jmnicolas 6y ago> Humans don't like simple things. I like simple things, am I not human?
- ccozan 6y agoThe brain obscures a lot of complexities. Just take any simple thing and start thinking of any aspect of it. That itself is not simple!!