Actually my articles are made to demystify a misunderstood or opaque notion. By doing so, developers can take the decision to apply the notion or not by knowing all the aspects of it.

Also, this enhances their general culture about the language.

After, your point of view is also correct. Maybe, in a near future I’ll start to share my experience with the notions that I treat in my articles.

Thanks for the feedback. It’s really appreciated :-)

I think he’s (sarcastically) saying it’s a pretty small chunk of the world. Like I could give a homeless person a sandwich, making the world a better place, but I wouldn’t expect a medal for it. Not my criticism.

I feel like this is pretty much the same for me (aside from the meetup bit).

Have you ever worked with windows or have you been able to stay away from it professionally?

Yeah. I hadn’t used Windows since Win 3.1, until I started working for the state (in the Win XP era). I still don’t use it at home, but all my dayjob work is on Windows, and C#.

Most people who are complaining that they pay less are the tech workers who hustle hard in Silicon Valley or at one of the big N companies. While government jobs can pay really well and have excellent value especially when considered pay/hours and benefits like pensions, a Google employee’s ceiling is going to be way higher.

There’s a subreddit where software engineers share their salaries and it seems like big N companies can pay anything from $300k–700k USD when you consider their total package. No government job is going to match that.

I do.

Pros: hours, and benefits. Less trend-driven development and red queen effect. Less age discrimination (probably more diversity in general, at least compared to Silicon Valley).

Cons: low pay, hard to hire and retain qualified people. Bureaucracy can be galling, but I imagine that’s true in large private sector organizations, too.

We’re not that behind the times here; we’ve avoided some dead-ends by being just far enough behind the curve to see stuff fail before we can adopt it.

Also, depending on how well your agency’s goals align with your values, Don’t Be Evil can actually be realistic.

I don’t, but I’m very envious of my family members who do.

One time my cousin (works for the state’s Department of Forestry) replied to an email on Sunday and they told him to take 4 hours off Monday to balance it off.

That said, from a technological perspective I’d imagine it would be quite behind in times, and moves very slowly. If you’re a diehard agile manifesto person (I’m not) I probably wouldn’t recommend it.

EDIT: I guess it’s really what you value more. In the public sector, you get free time at the expense of money. In the private sector, vice versa. I can see someone who chases the latest technologies and loves to code all day long being miserable there, but for people who just code so they can live a fulfilling life outside of work it could be a good fit.

My 2 cents - a few years ago I had a powerful laptop (one of the WS Lenovos, maybe 16-32GB RAM, i7, etc.) and I tried VMWare (paid edition - company paid for it), Microsoft Hyper-V, and VirtualBox. I could never get rid of, or stop being bothered by, input lag.

I have. I… do not like it.

He didn’t grow up immersed in American culture and values. It would be unrealistic to expect him to hold or conform to American values.

As an Italian, I can say that after the WWII, US did a great job to spread their culture in Europe.
Initially to counter the “Bolsheviks” influx, later as a carrier for their products.

They have been largely successful.
Indeed, I love Joplin just like I love Vivaldi, Mozart and Beethoven! :-)
But we have thousands years of variegate history, so we are not going to completely conform anyway. After all, we are proud of our deep differences, as they enrich us.

This is a good question that is worth of a deep answer. I’ll rush a fast one here, but I might write something more in the near future.

All hacks are political, but some are more evidently so. An example is Stallman’s GNU GPL. Actually the whole GNU project is very political. Almost as political as BSDs. Another evidently political hack was done by Cambridge Analytica with Facebook’s user data.

The core value of hackers activity is curiosity: hackers want to learn. We value freedom and sharing as a mean to get more knowledge for the humanity.

As such, hacking is always political: its goal is always to affect (theoretically, to improve) the community in one way or another.

Challenging laws or authorities is something that follows naturally from such value, but it’s not done to get power or profit, just to learn (and show) something new. This shows how misleading is who distinguish hats’ colours: if you are an hacker you won’t have problems to violate stupid laws to learn and/or share some knowledge, be it a secret military cablage, how to break a DRM system or how to modify a game console: it’s not the economical benefit you are looking for, but the knowledge. The very simple fact that some knowledge is restricted, forbidden or simply unexplored, is a strong incentive for an hacker to try to gain it, using her knowledge and creativity.

But even the most apparently innocent hack is political!
See Rust, Go, Haskell or Oberon: each with its own vision of how and who should program and of what one should expect from a software.
See HTTP browsers: very political tools that let strangers from a different state run code (soon assembly-like) on your pc (ironically with your consent!).
See Windows, Debian GNU/Linux or OpenBSD: each powerful operating systems which their own values and strong political vision (yes, even OpenBSD).
See ESR appropriation of the jergon file (not much curiosity here actually, just a pursuit for power)!

Curiosity is not the only value of an hacker, but all hackers share such value.

Now, this is also a value each hacker express in a different way: I want everyone to become an hacker, because I think this would benefit the whole humanity. Others don’t want to talk about the political responsibility of hacking because they align with the regime they live in (be it Silicon Valley, Raqqa, Moscow or whatever), and politically aware hackers might subvert it.

But even if you don’t want to acknowledge such responsibility, if you hack, you are politically active, for better or worse.

That’s also the main difference between free software and open source software, for example: free software fully acknowledge such ethical (and thus political) responsibility, open source negate it.

I think we’re discussing the same thing but disagreeing on the semantics of it.

• Belief #1: Sharing how you learned something can be a valuable tool to someone else.
• Belief #2: Tutorials can seem like they’re from a source of authority, so a lack of a disclaimer could be hazardous.
• Belief #3: Imposter syndrome is real. We need to mitigate misinformation, but not at the expense of people being afraid to share.

Publishing your tutorial gives it an audience, which means someone may (hopefully!) come along and correct you on your errors. This is invaluable.

Absolutely invaluable, but at the very same time, the exposure spreads the misinformation to more readers, potentially doing more harm than good. I don’t think a disclaimer is enough. I think the word “tutorial” implies some authority, unfortunately.

I think a better way is to humbly share a report of your findings so far, with questions and an (as appropriate) admission that you don’t understand everything. Julia Evans is masterful at this style.

As a reader new to the topic, you get the benefit of an explanation of what she currently understands (which is often from a beginner’s mind), and usually some questions to seek answers to on your own. As an expert of the topic, you are invited to share more, or clarify, or correct (and this happens a lot on twitter, and/or HN, etc). But you’re doing so from a place of empathy (you want to be helpful) instead of from a place of disgust (ugh! why is this tutorial so bad!).

I’ve put tens of thousands of lines of C into production, including multiple Linux kernel drivers. In one case, those kernel drivers were critical-path code on a device used in strain testing the wings of an airplane that you might’ve flown in by now.

I’m not a stranger to the kernel; I just left that world. Behavior like Linus’ in that email was part of the reason, though far from the only reason.

With all of that said: having written a bunch of systems software shouldn’t be a prerequisite for suggesting that we avoid attacking people personally when they make programming mistakes, or what we suspect are programming mistakes.

“brain damaged” is a meme among old school hackers which isn’t as strong of a word as you think.

Yikes. That “meme” is a whole other thing I don’t even care to unpack right now.

I don’t use hipster as an insult or to imply wrongness, but I do use it to invalidate his point. Gary is a Ruby developer. Linus is a kernel developer. The worlds are far removed from each other.

Gotcha. Kernal developer == real old-school hacker. Ruby developer == script kiddie hipster. Are we really still having this argument in 2018?

Right, “professionalism” implies that you only need to be nice to somebody when you want them to something for you or want their money. This should actually be about “respect”, whether or not you want a Linux contributor to do something for you or want their money.

If I look at who the contributors to the Linux kernel are, it would certainly appear to be a professional endeavor.

A large chunk of contributions to the kernel are made by people who are getting paid by the companies they work for to contribute. Sounds like a professional setting to me.

Linus himself is working in a professional capacity. He’s employed by the Linux Foundation to work on Linux. The fact he is employed to work on an open source project that he founded doesn’t make that situation non-professional.