Reading 10: When are we going to read about a jacked programmer



The way Linus Torvalds writes about his upbringing is in my opinion very digestible and interesting to read, even if it isn’t anything all too special. He has a certain way of writing such that his voice seems to pour out of the page - it’s dripping with his sardonic way of talking and his sarcastic humor. In terms of his actual upbringing, it bears a surprising number of similarities to mine, albeit with some big differences.
Growing up, I was also exposed to computers at a very young age. My aunt is a computer programmer in Uruguay, although she works as an consultant and thus travels internationally quite frequently for work. As a child, she’d come and visit while she was working every year or so, and every few years she’d take a week or two off and have a longer vacation here (one of the perks of living in New York City). My aunt wasn’t a professor of statistics, but she told me a lot about her job and programming in general, and encouraged me to learn more about it. I was always very interested in it, so from a young age I decided I wanted to do something related to programming, and when it came time to choose a high school to go to, I specifically chose a school that offered programming every semester, and had tech related electives. Crucially though, I was a bit more social than Linus. When I was younger, I used to play outside every day and barely ever used the computer (I didn’t get my own computer until I was in 4th or 5th grade, and the family computer was too old to handle anything other than basic web browsing). However, once I got exposed to computers by my aunt, I knew I wanted to know how they worked, what made them tick. I remember watching YouTube tutorials about basic scripts you could run on a windows machine (something that sticks out to me is running an infinite boot loop script on my parents computer to try and prank them, although I removed it after testing it because I knew they’d be mad). I even tried signing up for the Chromebook pilot program, and got them to ship me a Chromebook by pretending I was a developer (my mom wasn’t happy about that and didn’t let me use it for a few months because she was angry I lied about that).
Something that I find interesting about Linus compared to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs is that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs from the beginning set out to create a business. They were capitalists through and through, and wanted to sell their product and make some money. Linus simply wanted to do something neat, to scratch an itch that he had. Linus also didn’t come from the same background that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs came from (wealthy/upper middle class families), and yet instead of trying to monetize his product, he decided to give it away. Linus is definitely reminiscent of the hackers of the 60s in MIT Lab. As for me personally, I don’t know what that itch is yet that I want to scratch. I suppose I don’t like my Spotify recommendations, so I’ve been meaning to write a better version of that. But I have no idea where I would start, and it’s also not a big deal to me, so I’ve no real motivation to work on it. Maybe I’ll find something in the future while working on my open source contributions, or in my job, but for now I don’t have an itch to scratch.

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