1. How to become a hacker?
(In the 21st century)

2. Probably you're (just) a geek.

4. But you want more, right?

5. Story #1

7. Lesson #1: Prepare for a long trip.

8. Story #2

10. Lesson #2: Find mentors.

11. Story #3

13. Lesson #3: Distinguish yourself.

14. Story #4

15. https://vimeo.com/22798433

16. Lesson #4: Go interactive.

17. Story #5

19. Lesson #5: Hold your hands.

20. Story #6

22. Lesson #6: Play (don't comment).

23. Story #7

24. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6HCOGj1lNI

25. Lesson #7: Start now.

26. Lesson #8: Restart often.

27. ...

28. Yet another story

30. Bad news: your boss will not be your mentor.

31. Good news: your hacking mentors are alive!

33. That's probably why you want to be a hacker.

34. The virtuous circle
and the dangerous triangle
(Three inspiring hackers)

39. It's hard to be both patient and enthusiastic

40. It's hard to be both patient and enthusiastic
It's hard to be both enthusiastic and smart

41. It's hard to be both patient and enthusiastic
It's hard to be both enthusiastic and smart
It's hard to be both smart and patient

42. It's hard to be both patient and enthusiastic
It's hard to be both enthusiastic and smart
It's hard to be both smart and patient
Do your best!

43. It's hard to be both patient and enthusiastic
It's hard to be both enthusiastic and smart
It's hard to be both smart and patient
Do your best!
(When dealing with yourself and with others.)

44. We are more powerful but more impatient.

45. ...

46. Hands on!

47. Fix your email setup
(Demo Gnus)

48. Marry your text editor
(Demo GNU Emacs)

49. Master your versioning system
(Demo Git/magit)

50. Have a TODO list system
(Demo Emacs Org-mode)

51. Learn how to make a bug report
(Demo bad and good reports)

52. Scratch your own itch
(Start small)

53. Scratch other people's itches
(Start small)

54. Pick up a programming language
(Can't really help on this)

55. Understand users' environments
(Demo)

56. Learn how to test
(Demo)

57. Learn how to read/write english
(Demo)

58. Postel's law & robustness principle:
"Be conservative in what you do...
...be liberal in what you accept from others"

59. ...

60. A typical free software project

61. • A website
• .zip/.tar.gz files to install
• Discussion list(s) and IRC channel(s)
• Documentation
• A publicly accessible repository
• A Bug tracker
• A Community
• An ecosystem (distribs, forks, [up|down]stream)

62. Example: GNU Emacs

70. ...

71. Hands off!

72. Get a computing culture
(Write... and read)

73. Get a free software culture
(Read... and write)

74. "Computer criticism"
(Seymour Papert)

75. "Learnable programming"
(Brett Victor)

76. Thanks!
Bastien Guerry
Jan. 18th 2012
bzg@gnu.org
http://lumiere.ens.fr/~guerry/

77. (Bonus tracks)

78. How To Become a Hacker
by Eric S. Raymond
http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

79. Growing the Org-mode community
• Community documentation (Worg)
• A mailing list for both users and developers
• No roadmap
• No separate bug tracker (we use the mailing list)
• Attract great power users
• Give as much freedom to users as you can

80. The thrill of collaborating

81. Free software and innovation
Krzysztof Klincewicz, Innovativeness of open source software projects, August 11, 2005

82. Free Software history
• 1983: Richard Stallman starts the GNU project
• 1984: RMS starts the Free Software Foundation
• 1985: First free software license for GNU Emacs
• 1989: GNU GPL v1.0 (v2.0 in 1991)
• 1992: Linus publishes Linux under GPLv2
• 1998: Project Mozilla kicks off
• 2001: Wikipedia and Creative Commons kick off
• 2002: Release of Firefox 1.0
• 2005: First release of Git
• 2007: GPL v3.0 and CC v3.0

83. Free licenses history
• 1989 : GPLv1
• 1991 : GPLv2
• 1999 : BSD
• 2001 : CC fondé
• 2002 : CC v1
• 2004 : CC v2
• 2005 : CC v2.5
• 2007 : GPLv3 et CCv3
• 2009 : Lancement CC0

84. When you are a teenager, alone with a (programmable)
computer, the universe is alive with infinite possibilities. You are
a god. Master of all you survey. Then you go to school, major in
"Computer Science", graduate – and off to the salt mines with
you, where you will stitch silk purses out of sow’s ears in some
braindead language, building on the braindead systems created
by your predecessors, for the rest of your working life. There will
be little room for serious, deep creativity. You will be constrained
by the will of your master (whether the proverbial "pointy-haired
boss", or lemming-hordes of fickle startup customers) and by the
limitations of the many poorly-designed systems you will use
once you no longer have an unconstrained choice of task and
medium.
Engelhart’s violin, http://www.loper-os.org/?p=861

85. Software Engineer to join its close-knit, agile
engineering team Candidates must be intellectually
curious, self-driven, highly motivated and
productive. They must be problem-solvers, who are
passionate about shipping code, and building
robust and scalable Internet applications.
Wait!... maybe your boss will be a hacker too?

86. ~$ cd me/; git shortlog
• 1986 : Some programming in LOGO and BASIC
• 1984-1992 : Playing LEGO
• 1995-2003 : Philosophy and cognitive sciences
• 1998- .... : Free Software hacktivist
• 2007- .... : Learning tomorrow (Book)
• 2008- .... : One Laptop Per Child France
• 2010-2011 : Wikimédia France
• 2010- .... : Emacs Org-mode maintainer