Lo que nunca terminé: Codewriters

A Linux box boots up.

The old computer sits on a messy desk, in an equally messy room where computing gear is piled up. Disks, books, hardcopies and CDs populate the small room, all in an organized mess. A network card is left carelessly on the floor. A blown power supply is left on a corner, guts open, gathering dust.

As the OS goes booting patiently, an alarm clock besides a bed rings, waking up Brian, a 19-year old young sleeping underneath a pile of blankets.
Eyes closed, he feels around for the clock, finds it, and shuts it off. He doesn’t feel like getting up yet as he went to sleep pretty late.

A beaten-up Camel book is at his side on the bed, with three print-outs of Perl code heavily scratched and annnotated with a blue pen, the one used like an improvised bookmark for the book. Brian opens one eye. The boot sequence has finished. He remembers he configured his machine to turn itself on at 9 o’clock two days ago, and forgot to turn it off.
He rolls on the bed covering himself and falls asleep again.

Two hours later, a 36-year old woman knocks the door and comes in. It’s Brian’s mother, Helen, who just arrived from her job.
«Wake up, Brian! Waake up!!! It’s past eleven already!» she shouted at the pile of blankets. «You’re going to clean this room today — it’s been three days since I told you I wanted this to look like an ordinary boy’s room. Get up now, and I mean NOW.»
She left the room as Brian got up slowly, clearly upset. He rubbed his eyes.
«I’m not an ordinary boy»- he said coldly.

While Brian was showering, Helen was at the kitchen, talking about her morning loudly enough for Brian to listen.
«They’ve got it all screwed up, they have no formal procedures! I wonder how in the world they had survived for so long, but I’m glad they did, since this will keep us with enough cash for… six months at best…!»
Brian listened boringly. It’s not that he didn’t care; he wanted to think on some other programming problem. He always had this problem of giving attention to many other things he thought more important, while real-world and uninteresting things were happening, or were talked about. He didn’t listen to radio or watch late TV news, but he read Slashdot daily and kept himself updated with news about technology and programming. He gets to hear about the really important news from his mother or a newspaper, but usually he didn’t care about politics or the latest scandal of famous person X.
Brian was absent-minded for obvious things, but pretty alert for small details. He is good catching patterns. And he is also very shy. The reason for that shyness was his father’s rejection to accept him as a child. He saw other children and friends having normal families, he grew with the mark of rejection, of being different to the rest of the world. His mother did her best to be both mother and father, and keep him educated and healthy, even at the cost of herself. She once fainted in front of him for the lack of food, which horrorized Brian. He felt it was all his fault.

Then the movings begun. First they moved to the house of Helen’s brother. It wasn’t for so long as he wanted to get married, so they felt obligued to leave, this time to Minessota where a job oportunity was at hand. It wasn’t that much, but Helen had the hope it would allow Brian complete his school studies. Alas, he didn’t. Helen was fired five months later since she «wasn’t working efficiently.»
They moved again, this time to Buffalo, for another job oportunity. Brian finished his schooling and met the very thing that would change his life: computers. The school had a computer lab and the teacher was very friendly and bright. His name was Gary.
He taught programming, which easily made sense to Brian and found himself excelling on it and getting inmediate gratification.
Gary saw Brian’s progress and encouraged him to learn more. He borrowed him a Borland Pascal book, which Brian photocopied and devoured. He was learning quickly, leaving later Pascal to C, which he found rather difficult.
Later, he helped Gary write an engineering program in Delphi, which was modestly successful. Gary shared part of the money with Brian, who inmediately saw his future as a professional programmer.
That, he decided, was what he wanted to be.

But Brian knew he would never be able to afford a computer. He could only use one on the few moments Gary let him stay off classes, or when he visited Gary’s house. Other than that, owning a computer was a dream. He knew he would never get far if he didn’t own one.
Then school was over. He still visited Gary sporadically. He was now raving about something named Linux, which he said was better than Windows but looked ugly to Brian.
It wasn’t the same as before, Brian couldn’t use a computer like he used to.

Months came, months went, and Brian found himself still coding… on paper. He had lots of ideas running on his head and wrote them down on a notebook. He designed programs and even wrote large parts of code of one game based on a Super Nintendo title. He debugged the program running the code in his head and keeping variable values on his head, fingers and separate sheets of paper. It was a waste of time for Helen to see Brian tracing program executions with a pen for hours, and she was right. Frustration had to come sooner or later to Brian and reality had to hit him hard, make him cry and make him realize things don’t change unless one goes outside and makes it happen.
He got to teach some computer classes to a pair of little kids with a big house and a pretty cool computer, which, in Brian’s opinion, was a complete waste of machine and an exercise on how unfair life can be sometimes. He taught them how to use Windows 95, how to type their assignments in Word and how to kill imps in Doom. But according to Brian’s calculations, at this rate he would have his own computer in about 20 years. No way. He needed a better job, a faster way to get money.
Months came, months went, and Brian found himself frustrated and depressed.

Then he turned seventeen. He was on a bad mood, few of his school friends called him over and only one of them actually came to his house: Jennifer King. He liked her secretly, but never dared to say anything, except for that day he called her for a school assignment. He thought it was her who answered the phone. He asked for «Jennifer Queen» as a way to catch her attention and hear how she reacted, but it turned out it was her little sister on the phone.
Not many months passed since school days, but Jennifer looked somehow more attractive. She was shorter than Brian, skinny, coffee eyes and brownish hair. He was surprised she remembered his birthday. He didn’t even know hers.
They talked long that day outside of the building, sitting on the sidewalk. It was easy to make her laugh, since she seemed to like his jokes. He liked the way she giggled. He liked a lot of things about her and wondered how no one else at class ever noticed how beautiful she is. They talked about everything and nothing at all, but Brian wasn’t ready yet to open himself completely. She was special to Brian, but she still was a stranger.

«What are your plans?» she asked.
«Don’t know yet. I’d like to get a job…»
«Don’t you wanna study something first?»
«Well… yeah, but I’ll need to pay that myself, so getting a job is what I’m after right now.»
«I see.»
«And you? Do you have plans?»
She smiled. «I’m still not sure what to do with my life. I guess I need to go out there and try different things until I find out what I’d like to do for the rest of my life. Sometimes I tie myself thinking it’s a one-time decision and failure scares me… but then I tell myself I have this great thing called time… and that I can try this and that until I find what I want, no matter how many times I’ll fail.»
She pauses for a moment.
«I don’t know what you think,» she says. «My Mom thinks it’s irresponsible, that it’s a waste of time and money, that I should make my mind… but I can’t. I have so many options and I can’t decide. It’s like I’d like to do everything at once.»
«Like what?» he asked.
«Like… well, like interior design. I like that. I like painting. I like music. I like architecture. I like publicity too.»
«Wow. Well, then why not architecture? It sounds great as a career.»
«Yeah, but it’s like I’m for it for days and I read books about it and take photos– I like photography too, but then… it’s like I don’t want it anymore. Like a vogue, a fad. Do you think there’s something wrong with me?»
Brian looked at her. There’s nothing wrong with you, baby, he thought.
«I don’t know. I have the same problem.»
«No way!» she said, smiling.
«No, really…!»
«I thought you were into computers!»
«I am! But ‘computers’ is a very broad definition, it’s like saying ‘engineering,’ there’s lots of things to do: programming, network administration, tech support, hardware design, et cetera. And on programming there’s lots of areas to cover: game programming, applications, kernels… databases, internet… I cannot decide.»

There was a long pause, sitting silently for several minutes, thinking about the future. Brian couldn’t guess what Jennifer was thinking about, but he was thinking on the future, wishing to find a programming job. Where would he be in five years? Programming? Still looking for a job? Doing something else? No way, doing something else was not an option.

«Brian,» she said.
«Yes?»
«Do you know why I’m here?»
Brian thought it for a moment, wondering what that she really meant.
«It’s my birthday,» was his best answer.
Jennifer smiled, then she sighed.
«It’s almost six, I have to go,» she said, looking at her watch.
Brian cursed himself, that wasn’t the right answer. And in life you can’t undo.
He scratched his head. «Thanks for coming… can–»
«I had a nice time,» she interrupted. «Sorry, what were you saying?»
«Can I have your number?»
«Sure,» she said and waited for Brian to produce a paper or look for a pen in his pockets. But he didn’t do anything remotely close to that, he stood just there.
«It’s…?» Brian asked shyly.
«55-2256,» she said. «You won’t forget?»
«No, it’s an easy number,» Brian said, mentally storing the «256,» which is an easy number for sure, and «552», which reversed is «255», which is another easy number.
She looked at him for a moment, then smiled.

A taxi cab was coming, and she stopped it. Brian moved first and opened the door for her, which caused a bigger smile on Jennifer. When Brian closed the door she lowered the window.
«How much is 8 plus 3?» she asked.
The question puzzled Brian. «Eleven,» he said, baffled.
«What was my phone number?»
«552-256,» Brian said without resisting an smile.
«Call me,» she waved, smiling back. The taxi drove off.

.
.
Suddenly, a taxi parked in front of them and Brian’s mother got off, with a big, beautiful smile.
«Happy birthday, Brian! Help me carry up the boxes of your new computer!»
His jaw dropped, he couldn’t believe his eyes. It wasn’t a dream. It was real. Real. Real as every box jammed in the little car. Real as the smell of the packaging plastics, as the excitement which surrounded him every day afterwards.
The computer wasn’t actually new, but wasn’t that old either. Helen got it from a friend of her brother at an absurd price.

Brian got off the bathroom, tossing the towel. He then appeared at the kitchen combing his hair.
«Tell me you’ve done something productive last night,» Helen said, smiling.
«I wrote a Perl script to create Unix users from any parsable text list,» he said in a breath.
«Good,» was her answer… not understanding a single word.

Chapter 2
Codewriters

Writing code is a silent art, a noiseless war between a man and a problem. It is the triumph over difficulty, over one’s own limits. A hacker’s motivation to resolve problems is the same of a climber, attracted by a difficult mountain. But his craft goes way beyond reaching the top and planting a flag. Hackers enjoy creating things out of nothing, often with clever algorithms, amusing the few who understand it, boring to tears those who don’t. Hackers are the ones who make life easier to the rest of the world; they will happily solve problems even if they don’t get credited as they should. Hackers control machines, calculate budgets, entertain people, send astronauts to the Moon, play CDs, light up semaphores and save people’s lifes. Yet, they aren’t understood, their work being reduced to a nerd obssesion, to an unfair incomprehension.

What others don’t dare to touch, hackers will go as far as breaking the thing to find out how it works, just as they did with their toy cars as children. Their curiosity is what makes them different. And being different, they don’t fear trying different and new things. Even old things on a new context. The motivation of a true hacker is never to break things for fun, even if his knowledge allows him to do so. A hacker creates things, solves problems. A hacker is not part of the problem.

A hacker is an artist in a foreign world, an ethereal one made of bits and bytes, opcodes and CPU cycles. In this world, time is compressed, lunch hours are skipped, friends are forgotten, night is hacking time and spouses are left asleep. While disciplined in many ways, hackers frequently lack balance with the real world, incrementing their nerdish fame.