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Edit: He seems to have a lot of interest and worked a lot on good documentation, which is the bane of the typical OSS project. Why doesn't Red Hat/Google etc. t

Edit: He seems to have a lot of interest and worked a lot on good documentation, which is the bane of the typical OSS project. Why doesn't Red Hat/Google etc. throw some money at him to write docs for underdocumented OSS stuff? Sounds like win win for all. It's hard to find really smart developers that are interested in writing documentation.[End edit] If you don't really know him, his LinkedIn profile shows more details about his work. http://www.linkedin.com/in/xahlee http://www.linkedin.com/in/xahlee Xah Lee's Summary Full stack web site development. Heavy backend experience + unix sys adimn. Seek startupish, small team engineers environment. Accomplishment highlights: • Autodidact. High school dropout. No degree. • Taught graduate math students at National Center for Theoretical Sciences, Taiwan. • Invited speaker to Geometry And Visualization workshop, Tokyo Metropolitan University. • Work cited in US Patent. • Well-known open source contributor in emacs and LISP communities. • Expert in: JavaScript, Perl, Python, PHP, Emacs Lisp, Mathematica, MyLinux, SQL, Second Life Linden Scripting Language. Each with at least ten thousand lines of code. (working knowledge Java) Specialties: • Design, code, entire system. Understand language, protocols, raw. Do not depends on frameworks/libs when unnecessary. Portforlio: • Xah's JavaScript Tutorial 〔 http://xahlee.info/js/js.html http://xahlee.info/js/js.html 〕 • Xah's {Python, Perl, Ruby} Tutorial 〔 http://xahlee.info/perl-python/index.html http://xahlee.info/perl-python/index.html 〕 • Xah Emacs Lisp Tutorial 〔 http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/elisp.html http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/elisp.html 〕 • Xah's Java Tutorial 〔 http://xahlee.info/java-a-day/java.html http://xahlee.info/java-a-day/java.html 〕 • Xah Linux Tutorial 〔 http://xahlee.info/linux/linux_index.html http://xahlee.info/linux/linux_index.html 〕 • Xah's HTML5 Tutorial 〔 http://xahlee.info/js/index.html http://xahlee.info/js/index.html 〕 • Xah's CSS53 Tutorial 〔 http://xahlee.info/js/css_index.html http://xahlee.info/js/css_index.html 〕 • Programing Language Design 〔 http://xahlee.info/comp/comp_lang.html http://xahlee.info/comp/comp_lang.html 〕 Xah Lee's Experience Author and Webmaster XahLee.info January 2007 – Present (7 years 5 months) San Francisco Bay Area Creator and author of award-winning website http://xahlee.info/ http://xahlee.info/ , since 1997. • 8 thousand visitors per day. 240 thousand visitors per month. • 5 thousand HTML pages • Frequently cited in academic journals as well as online sites such as StackOverflow, Hacker News, Reddit, Wikipedia. Also cited by Microsoft TypeScript publication. (see list of citations below.) Published more than 50 software. Have a look at • Xah's JavaScript Tutorial 〔 http://xahlee.info/js/js.html http://xahlee.info/js/js.html 〕 • Xah's {Python, Perl, Ruby} Tutorial 〔 http://xahlee.info/perl-python/index.html http://xahlee.info/perl-python/index.html 〕 • Xah Emacs Lisp Tutorial 〔 http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/elisp.html http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/elisp.html 〕 • Xah's Java Tutorial 〔 http://xahlee.info/java-a-day/java.html http://xahlee.info/java-a-day/java.html 〕 • Xah Linux Tutorial 〔 http://xahlee.info/linux/linux_index.html http://xahlee.info/linux/linux_index.html 〕 • Programing Language Design 〔 http://xahlee.info/comp/comp_lang.html http://xahlee.info/comp/comp_lang.html 〕 Xah Lee's Projects Programming Tutorial: Python June 2006 to Present Team Members: Xah Lee

nkozyra 12y ago
Is he a particularly noted person? Maybe just in the emacs community? I don't know who he is and that resume is pretty skimpy. It seems that his biggest need right now is self-presentation and that's a pretty tough thing to acquire on short notice. I'd also say there would likely be way more opportunities for someone of his skillset outside of the valley, where the skimpy resume probably looks even skimpier by comparison. I realize leaving is tough when you don't have a car, but he also won't have a home soon. Some relocation may be in order. Best of luck to him either way.
- Singletoned 12y ago
  He's certainly 'notorious' in certain circles. He used to be considered a troll in certain newsgroups, because he's very argumentative. I think he is in some ways the prototypical hacker. He's very good at what he does, but he struggles to do anything with financial value, and he's got very bad interpersonal skills. He's done quite a lot of Emacs work, particularly around trying to make it easier to work with. His work was very helpful to me when I was starting out with Emacs, so I've given him some money. His documentation saved me weeks of work over the years, so giving him a days wages is a no-brainer.
  - nkozyra 12y ago
    Ah, thanks. I think there's a lot of room for boisterous, outspoken and even aggressive developers, but you really gotta prove you have the chops to earn that. I'd agree with your assessment that interpersonal skills are the issue (in fact he agrees, too) and that's not something you can fix overnight. I really think the best situation for this guy is to get out of the valley for a bit, get a job doing some very focused dev/maintenance stuff in his areas of expertise (Python/JS?) and design a personal reboot plan.
    - pekk 12y ago
      You really gotta prove you have the chops to deliver judgement on Xah Lee. I have no idea who you are and I can't tell you did anything as helpful as Xah Lee did. Maybe you should just refrain from judging people like this so harshly when you don't really know anything about them. Your attitude sucks. I would never, ever want to work with you when you talk smack on people like this without knowing anything about them.

nkozyra 12y ago

Is he a particularly noted person? Maybe just in the emacs community? I don't know who he is and that resume is pretty skimpy. It seems that his biggest need right now is self-presentation and that's a pretty tough thing to acquire on short notice. I'd also say there would likely be way more opportunities for someone of his skillset outside of the valley, where the skimpy resume probably looks even skimpier by comparison. I realize leaving is tough when you don't have a car, but he also won't have a home soon. Some relocation may be in order. Best of luck to him either way.

Singletoned 12y ago
He's certainly 'notorious' in certain circles. He used to be considered a troll in certain newsgroups, because he's very argumentative. I think he is in some ways the prototypical hacker. He's very good at what he does, but he struggles to do anything with financial value, and he's got very bad interpersonal skills. He's done quite a lot of Emacs work, particularly around trying to make it easier to work with. His work was very helpful to me when I was starting out with Emacs, so I've given him some money. His documentation saved me weeks of work over the years, so giving him a days wages is a no-brainer.
- nkozyra 12y ago
  Ah, thanks. I think there's a lot of room for boisterous, outspoken and even aggressive developers, but you really gotta prove you have the chops to earn that. I'd agree with your assessment that interpersonal skills are the issue (in fact he agrees, too) and that's not something you can fix overnight. I really think the best situation for this guy is to get out of the valley for a bit, get a job doing some very focused dev/maintenance stuff in his areas of expertise (Python/JS?) and design a personal reboot plan.
  - pekk 12y ago
    You really gotta prove you have the chops to deliver judgement on Xah Lee. I have no idea who you are and I can't tell you did anything as helpful as Xah Lee did. Maybe you should just refrain from judging people like this so harshly when you don't really know anything about them. Your attitude sucks. I would never, ever want to work with you when you talk smack on people like this without knowing anything about them.