reading 04: painting code

I found Chapter 1: Why Nerds Are Unpopular interesting because popularity didn’t seem to be as big of a deal in my elementary and middle schools. In my elementary school, each grade was divided into classrooms with roughly 25 students, and each classroom had two tables for lunch. Naturally, the girls sat at one of the tables and the guys sat at the other. I felt that, while some students were more popular than others, most students had their group of friends and didn’t necessarily want to be friends with the popular ones. Perhaps, the only time popularity really seemed to be relevant to me was when I entered middle school at small, all-boys Catholic school where I didn’t know anybody. I just wanted to make friends in general, and the popular kids seemed to be pretty good at befriending one another. But, eventually, I met all 46 guys in my class and found a group that I liked. So my experience is pretty different than the one that Paul Graham describes. However, I was interested in his reasoning for why the real world is more hospitable to nerds:

I think the important thing about the real world is not that it’s populated by adults, but that it’s very large, and the things you do have real effects. (Hackers & Painters, ch. 1)

This is a reasonable claim, although nowadays I feel as though smartphones have supressed certain bad behaviors because there have been numerous instances of people saying or doing something and having to face the consequences. It’s unfortunate that people have lost their jobs over one bad decision, but somehow I think that the overall smartphone culture has given a little more power back to the nerds. And the advances in technology allow nerds (at least, computer scientists) to spend limitless time learning from the hands-on computer experience. The following quote summarizes this sentiment well:

In hacking, like painting, work comes in cycles. Sometimes you get excited about a new project and you want to work sixteen hours a day on it. Other times nothing seems interesting. (Hackers & Painters, ch. 2)

I sometimes worry about not being passionate about work in my future job. I’ve definitely been in situations where I uttely lack an interest in the problem (aka Logic Design). On the other hand, there are projects where I would prefer to work on them than do anything else. I think there’s a certain threshold at which work becomes bearable, and anything under this threshold just won’t get my full enthusiasm and effort. Recently, I’ve enjoyed working on our spreadsheet project for Distributed Systems, and I often push off work for my other classes to write and bum code for it. Graham’s parallel between painting and hacking ran true for this project:

Paintings usually begin with a sketch … [But] sometimes the original plans turn out to be mistaken. Countless paintings, when you look at them in x-rays, turn out to have limbs that have been moved or facial features that have been readjusted. (Hackers & Painters, ch. 2)

I especially liked this because I visited the National Gallery of Ireland over the summer, and we got to see one painting with some of its sketches next to it. There were a lot of minor changes that went into the full product, and that’s not something you usually get to see. I suppose GitHub has affored hackers the luxury of seeing their work change, but it’s a bit better to see visually with a painting.

Ultimately, I think Paul Graham’s version of a hacker is compatible with Steven Levy’s. I hadn’t considered before that hackers are “the essence of Americanness,” but I agree. The story of Ring, the video doorbell system, as a little hack-turned-startup definitely has an American feel. I’m proud to be an Amer–I mean, hacker.