The notorious programmer: Informal stories and frank conversations about the IT-industry
The publishing house "Peter" is working out the idea to publish an unusual book. It will be a collection of informal interviews with well-known (and not so) IT specialists about their work, life and views. Perhaps, in Russian, this is the first attempt to explore the archetype of a computer programmer from different points of view.
We did not rely solely on very famous people (although several heroes, of course, are world-famous), and above all, we were interested in the brightness of each individual, their mutual diversity.
Logically, the entire book is planned from three sections-parts:
1) Interviews with programmers, admins, etc. - direct speech;
2) Interviews about information technologies and the Internet, their impact on society - professionals who are not directly developers, but who “cook” in this kitchen, will tell about their, sometimes, strange subculture and technologies;
3) Cases from the lives of programmers and IT people are some vivid and vivid examples of semi-humorous (or instructive) stories based on real facts and events (in the style of Weller and his Legend of Nevsky Prospect).
In the West, books of this kind are very popular: it is enough to recall Seibel 's “Coders at Work” , with us this genre is still just taking root.
In this regard, I would like to establish a preliminary feedback with future readers. Would you be curious about such a book? What questions and topics would be interesting to touch on? Maybe you would like to offer us some more interesting interlocutors?
')
Below the cut you can see the list of interviewees and a brief annotation on the topic of the conversation.
Interview with Richard Stallman - Zen Free Programming
The basic values ​​of the free GNU and OpenSource programs are considered. IT development trends are discussed. The second part deals with Stallman's personal preferences - his reasons for choosing childe free and the fundamental refusal to use a mobile phone, about money and the lifestyle of a loner.
Richard Stallman was born in 1953. A well-known programmer, founder of the free software movement, the GNU project, the Free Software Foundation and the Program Freedom League. The author of the concept of "copyleft", designed to protect the ideals of the movement. He leads a modest lifestyle of a wandering “preacher” and “philosopher” of the free program movement.
The author of the idea of ​​the holiday "Pritasti" (which should replace the Christmas itself). On this day, people celebrate the existence of understandable laws of physics. Since, according to legend, Newton discovered his law as a result of the fall of an apple, on this day it is recommended to decorate trees with apples or other fruits, but so that the fruit sometimes falls, revealing the law of the world in action.
Anonymous Interview - Chinese Internet via DPI DPI
Anonymous - a Russian IT professional who has long been living in China and has been involved in a government network infrastructure project in China as a contractor - for obvious reasons does not want his frankness to be seen by the employer. The talk will be about the device and the filtering of the “Great Chinese Firewall”. No one in Russian has discussed this issue so specifically and frankly from a technical point of view (this topic is relevant in the light of the threat of the trend of development of the Runet in the Chinese version). In China, nowadays, huge data-centers with a size comparable to our district cities are operating. Such closed cities form infrastructure nodes for the Chinese firewall and other government intranet services. The second logical part of this interview is the influence of such permanent network censorship on people's behavior and thinking, the sociological aspect of total control.
Interview with Adrian Lamo - The Hacker Theory of Happiness
Interview-sketching - how do people become hackers who personally broke AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, Excite @ Home, AT & T Telecom, MCI WorldCom, Intel, Bank of America, CityBank, Cisco, Google? Why from the point of view of a practicing hacker, ordinary corporate admins are complete losers? What is happiness, freedom and the goal of life from the point of view of Kevin Mitnick's best friend, American homeless hacker Adrian Lamo. A hacker who refused a profitable career at Cisco to remain free (and) unemployed.
Interview with Chris Kaspersky - Gospel of Mishchha
The story of the "wrong" programmer from a small village in the Kuban, who does not have higher education and does not recognize the authorities, but who has gone from a graduate student of a Russian university to a leading binary analyst working for the US government. What constitutes success, what is better to make a bet with professional growth, what works in a career and in programming, and what does not. Why can not stay in place, and why Chris wants to leave IT to make a career in the US Army? Why do only adventurers win, and conformists most often lose? A very detailed and frank conversation about the philosophy of life from the famous character in the hacker get-together - Chris aka myshha.
Interview with Tom Jennings - Fidonet 20 years later
Tom is a famous American programmer, the creator of Fidonet, a geek geek and an anarchist by conviction. How did Fido wonder what it eventually became, and why did it practically cease to exist? A former Apple Computer employee and BIOS developer at Phoenix Software talks about his vision for proper programming, using the goto operator, anarchy, and the future of the Internet. Why the policy practically does not influence in any way the fate of the programmer (and, therefore, there is no point in being interested in it), and also about his impressions of Russia. Also cited are the opinions and memories of the flourishing of the Russian Fidonet from the most different famous people of the Runet, from Alex Exler, to Leonid Kaganov and Zavalishin.
Interview with Andrey Chernov - Essentials of Control
On the hidden subtext and trends in the development of networks and our society. Forecasts about the increase in total control, the creation of Panoktium society (first half), the second half - about the development of OpenSource and the FreeBSD project, arguments about its differences from Linux, as well as thoughts about programming in general.
Andrei Chernov is known as one of the founding fathers of the Russian Internet, the developer of the mail program UUPC, which until the mass offensive of Windows, remained the most popular mail program on the territory of the former Soviet Union. Chernov brought worldwide fame to the development of the KOI-8 encoding, which has become a standard in the Russified UNIX system and its clones. For a long time, Chernov has been an active member of the international FreeBSD development team.
Activity of Andrey Chernov, is not limited to purely professional activities. He is one of the most serious popularizers of the ideas of Aleister Crowley, as well as the author, partner and keeper of several cyberpunk projects. He could be called the spiritual leader of the Russian network underground, if the existence of such a phenomenon was not in doubt.
Team Interview with PHP Core Team Developers
Present and future PHP, inside view. Three current members of the PHP Core Team, who also answer a lot of sensitive questions, say about the criticism of the implementation of the object-oriented model and the general “crutch” of PHP, tell us about the personal histories of their arrival in programming.
Interview with Justin Frankel - Alpha Geek from Arizona
Interview with the creator of WinAMP, where the main topic is the secret of success: both commercial and professional. Why do some people work all their life, at best, earning a house-apartment, while others quite ordinary programmers generate literally millions for millions of dollars (the case of Justin, who earned millions, while never working in the office) ... justin’s personal hobbies and passions are also considered .
Frankel spent his childhood among the inhabitants of the hippian commune in Arizona. I spent the evenings taking apart old radios and collecting something new from them. Carried away at work with the Atari computer, which belonged to the elder brother. By the time it was necessary to enroll in high school, Justin already knew absolutely everything about electronics. At seventeen, he was the first to "get married" digital music and a computer, creating the legendary Winamp program. After a year and a half, its owners were already 15 million users. Now Frankel has a fortune of $ 100 million.
Interview with Vsevolod Leonov - Delphi: very much alive
The modern history of Delphi. An attempt to explain in detail the possibilities of Delphi that are modern and partly unbelievable for the Visual Studio user, and also to tell about how from the unprofitable and dying language Delphi, as if Phoenix was revived as a completely commercially successful project.
Interview with a recruiting agent - The whole truth about employment with Google
A frank interview with a professional recruiter from Google, which tells about all the stages of the interview and the conditions imposed on the participants. The entire text is extremely focused on practical application, in which a variety of popular myths are being scattered, for example, that Google is recruiting the best programmers. In fact, according to the point estimate, Google most often prefers people who show results in the “slightly above average” area, rather than both extreme results (very good and very bad). Many of the stated facts most often appear in the NDA sections and are so frankly presented in Russian for the first time.
Interview with Victoria Feraggi - Suitcase Builds: Blue Card for IT Schnick
Interview with a former immigration officer about the details and specifics of the procedure for obtaining a Blue card for IT people + important practical advice on how to start when trying to work as a programmer in Europe (using the example of Germany).
Interview with Andrey Vladimirov - Overclocking gray matter
It is no secret that many American programmers use publicly available drugs to “break up” their brains and intellectual abilities. Now it has become so common that in some contracts a separate line is even explicitly prohibited. This is a detailed interview about the programmer's pharmacological kitchen from the inside: what works, what does not, and what is dangerous and, on the contrary, is safe. In addition to discussing the main substances and mechanisms of their work, the most basic tips are also given to improve their mental effectiveness.
Andrei Vladimirov is one of the well-known IT specialists in the field of network security and Wi-Fi, the author of bestsellers by Addison-Wesley, a PhD degree in Neuroscience and a BSc degree in Pharmacology / Toxicology, the author of a software simulation of the dying brain and many other scientific projects at the junction of IT and neurochemistry.
Planned interviews:
Jed McCaleb
Well-known American programmer - a specialist in cryptocurrency. Founder of the largest Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, a major amount of Bitcoin holder. Secretly preparing a new project of a fundamentally new electronic payment system Ripple, which should shake the world of Bitcoin and not only. The interview will be with him or with someone from his team.
At the epicenter of attention is the network and economy, society in the era of decentralized information channels, and how programmers in the future will be able to turn the monetary world of politicians.
Terry Davis
An ordinary programmer from Las Vegas, to whom 10 years ago (supposedly) God appeared, who called him to create an ideal operating system. After that, he quit his job and devoted himself to the main business of his life - the creation of the Losethos OS. Well known in the English segment of the Internet. In a sense, repeats the path of Linus Torvalds, but because of the strong religious background, he became the object of numerous ridicule and jokes.
Very bright geek, often his name is referred to as a synonym for "a programmer who went crazy on his programming." An attempt not only to tell about his project, but also to understand his sometimes strange motives.
Michael C. Sutton
An ordinary programmer from New York. A bright representative of the so-called media asceticism. A man who, by his real example, renounced material values ​​and pursued their accumulation. All his traditional offline values ​​are sold out, money is deposited into the account. All that is really appreciated - only digital media, containing a constant fixation of their own lives and activities (personal history). Such a person rents an apartment and has no personal property, except for digital data about himself, which he carefully accumulates and considers to be the true value in life. Adept Lifelogging.
We will talk about the values ​​and worldview of digital hermits, about this youth movement gaining momentum in the West.
Sergey Kishchenko
An ordinary Ukrainian programmer, leads a super mobile nomadic lifestyle, continuously traveling around the world. At the same time, he earns his living by programming on the road, doing it at every free moment - a bus, train or plane, etc. Recently, Sergei works in Google. We will discuss how to program non-stop in motion in general, try to better understand this way of life of a nomad programmer. We will also talk about working in Google and discuss some of the 50 countries of the world Sergey visited, in order to understand: “Where in the world should an IT person live well?”
We did not rely solely on very famous people (although several heroes, of course, are world-famous), and above all, we were interested in the brightness of each individual, their mutual diversity.
Logically, the entire book is planned from three sections-parts:
1) Interviews with programmers, admins, etc. - direct speech;
2) Interviews about information technologies and the Internet, their impact on society - professionals who are not directly developers, but who “cook” in this kitchen, will tell about their, sometimes, strange subculture and technologies;
3) Cases from the lives of programmers and IT people are some vivid and vivid examples of semi-humorous (or instructive) stories based on real facts and events (in the style of Weller and his Legend of Nevsky Prospect).
In the West, books of this kind are very popular: it is enough to recall Seibel 's “Coders at Work” , with us this genre is still just taking root.
In this regard, I would like to establish a preliminary feedback with future readers. Would you be curious about such a book? What questions and topics would be interesting to touch on? Maybe you would like to offer us some more interesting interlocutors?
')
Below the cut you can see the list of interviewees and a brief annotation on the topic of the conversation.
Interview with Richard Stallman - Zen Free Programming
The basic values ​​of the free GNU and OpenSource programs are considered. IT development trends are discussed. The second part deals with Stallman's personal preferences - his reasons for choosing childe free and the fundamental refusal to use a mobile phone, about money and the lifestyle of a loner.
Richard Stallman was born in 1953. A well-known programmer, founder of the free software movement, the GNU project, the Free Software Foundation and the Program Freedom League. The author of the concept of "copyleft", designed to protect the ideals of the movement. He leads a modest lifestyle of a wandering “preacher” and “philosopher” of the free program movement.
The author of the idea of ​​the holiday "Pritasti" (which should replace the Christmas itself). On this day, people celebrate the existence of understandable laws of physics. Since, according to legend, Newton discovered his law as a result of the fall of an apple, on this day it is recommended to decorate trees with apples or other fruits, but so that the fruit sometimes falls, revealing the law of the world in action.
Anonymous Interview - Chinese Internet via DPI DPI
Anonymous - a Russian IT professional who has long been living in China and has been involved in a government network infrastructure project in China as a contractor - for obvious reasons does not want his frankness to be seen by the employer. The talk will be about the device and the filtering of the “Great Chinese Firewall”. No one in Russian has discussed this issue so specifically and frankly from a technical point of view (this topic is relevant in the light of the threat of the trend of development of the Runet in the Chinese version). In China, nowadays, huge data-centers with a size comparable to our district cities are operating. Such closed cities form infrastructure nodes for the Chinese firewall and other government intranet services. The second logical part of this interview is the influence of such permanent network censorship on people's behavior and thinking, the sociological aspect of total control.
Interview with Adrian Lamo - The Hacker Theory of Happiness
Interview-sketching - how do people become hackers who personally broke AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, Excite @ Home, AT & T Telecom, MCI WorldCom, Intel, Bank of America, CityBank, Cisco, Google? Why from the point of view of a practicing hacker, ordinary corporate admins are complete losers? What is happiness, freedom and the goal of life from the point of view of Kevin Mitnick's best friend, American homeless hacker Adrian Lamo. A hacker who refused a profitable career at Cisco to remain free (and) unemployed.
Interview with Chris Kaspersky - Gospel of Mishchha
The story of the "wrong" programmer from a small village in the Kuban, who does not have higher education and does not recognize the authorities, but who has gone from a graduate student of a Russian university to a leading binary analyst working for the US government. What constitutes success, what is better to make a bet with professional growth, what works in a career and in programming, and what does not. Why can not stay in place, and why Chris wants to leave IT to make a career in the US Army? Why do only adventurers win, and conformists most often lose? A very detailed and frank conversation about the philosophy of life from the famous character in the hacker get-together - Chris aka myshha.
Interview with Tom Jennings - Fidonet 20 years later
Tom is a famous American programmer, the creator of Fidonet, a geek geek and an anarchist by conviction. How did Fido wonder what it eventually became, and why did it practically cease to exist? A former Apple Computer employee and BIOS developer at Phoenix Software talks about his vision for proper programming, using the goto operator, anarchy, and the future of the Internet. Why the policy practically does not influence in any way the fate of the programmer (and, therefore, there is no point in being interested in it), and also about his impressions of Russia. Also cited are the opinions and memories of the flourishing of the Russian Fidonet from the most different famous people of the Runet, from Alex Exler, to Leonid Kaganov and Zavalishin.
Interview with Andrey Chernov - Essentials of Control
On the hidden subtext and trends in the development of networks and our society. Forecasts about the increase in total control, the creation of Panoktium society (first half), the second half - about the development of OpenSource and the FreeBSD project, arguments about its differences from Linux, as well as thoughts about programming in general.
Andrei Chernov is known as one of the founding fathers of the Russian Internet, the developer of the mail program UUPC, which until the mass offensive of Windows, remained the most popular mail program on the territory of the former Soviet Union. Chernov brought worldwide fame to the development of the KOI-8 encoding, which has become a standard in the Russified UNIX system and its clones. For a long time, Chernov has been an active member of the international FreeBSD development team.
Activity of Andrey Chernov, is not limited to purely professional activities. He is one of the most serious popularizers of the ideas of Aleister Crowley, as well as the author, partner and keeper of several cyberpunk projects. He could be called the spiritual leader of the Russian network underground, if the existence of such a phenomenon was not in doubt.
Team Interview with PHP Core Team Developers
Present and future PHP, inside view. Three current members of the PHP Core Team, who also answer a lot of sensitive questions, say about the criticism of the implementation of the object-oriented model and the general “crutch” of PHP, tell us about the personal histories of their arrival in programming.
Interview with Justin Frankel - Alpha Geek from Arizona
Interview with the creator of WinAMP, where the main topic is the secret of success: both commercial and professional. Why do some people work all their life, at best, earning a house-apartment, while others quite ordinary programmers generate literally millions for millions of dollars (the case of Justin, who earned millions, while never working in the office) ... justin’s personal hobbies and passions are also considered .
Frankel spent his childhood among the inhabitants of the hippian commune in Arizona. I spent the evenings taking apart old radios and collecting something new from them. Carried away at work with the Atari computer, which belonged to the elder brother. By the time it was necessary to enroll in high school, Justin already knew absolutely everything about electronics. At seventeen, he was the first to "get married" digital music and a computer, creating the legendary Winamp program. After a year and a half, its owners were already 15 million users. Now Frankel has a fortune of $ 100 million.
Interview with Vsevolod Leonov - Delphi: very much alive
The modern history of Delphi. An attempt to explain in detail the possibilities of Delphi that are modern and partly unbelievable for the Visual Studio user, and also to tell about how from the unprofitable and dying language Delphi, as if Phoenix was revived as a completely commercially successful project.
Interview with a recruiting agent - The whole truth about employment with Google
A frank interview with a professional recruiter from Google, which tells about all the stages of the interview and the conditions imposed on the participants. The entire text is extremely focused on practical application, in which a variety of popular myths are being scattered, for example, that Google is recruiting the best programmers. In fact, according to the point estimate, Google most often prefers people who show results in the “slightly above average” area, rather than both extreme results (very good and very bad). Many of the stated facts most often appear in the NDA sections and are so frankly presented in Russian for the first time.
Interview with Victoria Feraggi - Suitcase Builds: Blue Card for IT Schnick
Interview with a former immigration officer about the details and specifics of the procedure for obtaining a Blue card for IT people + important practical advice on how to start when trying to work as a programmer in Europe (using the example of Germany).
Interview with Andrey Vladimirov - Overclocking gray matter
It is no secret that many American programmers use publicly available drugs to “break up” their brains and intellectual abilities. Now it has become so common that in some contracts a separate line is even explicitly prohibited. This is a detailed interview about the programmer's pharmacological kitchen from the inside: what works, what does not, and what is dangerous and, on the contrary, is safe. In addition to discussing the main substances and mechanisms of their work, the most basic tips are also given to improve their mental effectiveness.
Andrei Vladimirov is one of the well-known IT specialists in the field of network security and Wi-Fi, the author of bestsellers by Addison-Wesley, a PhD degree in Neuroscience and a BSc degree in Pharmacology / Toxicology, the author of a software simulation of the dying brain and many other scientific projects at the junction of IT and neurochemistry.
Planned interviews:
Jed McCaleb
Well-known American programmer - a specialist in cryptocurrency. Founder of the largest Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, a major amount of Bitcoin holder. Secretly preparing a new project of a fundamentally new electronic payment system Ripple, which should shake the world of Bitcoin and not only. The interview will be with him or with someone from his team.
At the epicenter of attention is the network and economy, society in the era of decentralized information channels, and how programmers in the future will be able to turn the monetary world of politicians.
Terry Davis
An ordinary programmer from Las Vegas, to whom 10 years ago (supposedly) God appeared, who called him to create an ideal operating system. After that, he quit his job and devoted himself to the main business of his life - the creation of the Losethos OS. Well known in the English segment of the Internet. In a sense, repeats the path of Linus Torvalds, but because of the strong religious background, he became the object of numerous ridicule and jokes.
Very bright geek, often his name is referred to as a synonym for "a programmer who went crazy on his programming." An attempt not only to tell about his project, but also to understand his sometimes strange motives.
Michael C. Sutton
An ordinary programmer from New York. A bright representative of the so-called media asceticism. A man who, by his real example, renounced material values ​​and pursued their accumulation. All his traditional offline values ​​are sold out, money is deposited into the account. All that is really appreciated - only digital media, containing a constant fixation of their own lives and activities (personal history). Such a person rents an apartment and has no personal property, except for digital data about himself, which he carefully accumulates and considers to be the true value in life. Adept Lifelogging.
We will talk about the values ​​and worldview of digital hermits, about this youth movement gaining momentum in the West.
Sergey Kishchenko
An ordinary Ukrainian programmer, leads a super mobile nomadic lifestyle, continuously traveling around the world. At the same time, he earns his living by programming on the road, doing it at every free moment - a bus, train or plane, etc. Recently, Sergei works in Google. We will discuss how to program non-stop in motion in general, try to better understand this way of life of a nomad programmer. We will also talk about working in Google and discuss some of the 50 countries of the world Sergey visited, in order to understand: “Where in the world should an IT person live well?”
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/229943/
All Articles