Hackers
Sean posted an article about an article he read entitled “Great Hackers”. Whenever I read articles about “great hackers” I become two separate people. On the one hand is the part of me that is trying very hard not to sense greatness about myself, but secretly knows I’m a great hacker; the other part is convinced that his twin is a nutjob, and that I shouldn’t bother thinking about whether I’m a great hacker because I’m not and just be happy while secretly despising that other people get to be “great hackers” and I don’t.
I don’t particularly like either of these people. I hope that I strike a happy medium between the two selves that wage war in me when I read great articles like this. “Hacker chic”, I call it. I love hackers. My friend, John Hood is a fantastic hacker… you can tell by his stylin’ HTML moves. This is the guy who writes video games, reverse engineered a Playstation 2 for fun, and is now making money reverse engineering cars when he’s not “doodling”, a process other human beings call “creating neat works of art”. John is absolutely a hacker, and I’m nowhere in his league for that stuff.
But neither am I strictly a codemonkey. I have a good head for design, I love tackling strange coding problems, and I dream about creating intelligent agents that will help me rule the world help all mankind evolve to a different plane. I’m writing a game in my spare time, I absolutely adore weird crusty technologies (witness the 800 baud modem and old style radio mike I have at home). Where does this put me?
I don’t know.