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→Steve Yegge in a talk entitled “What would you do with your own Google?”
In this particular talk, he stresses the importance of doing something “important” in your career. He puts this succinctly on a slide with “Always work on stuff you love!”. He laments that far too many talented programmers are busy working on software that solve unimportant problems, such as building platforms to view “cat pictures”. He suggests that important solutions like those sought by The Human Genome Project instead are going unheeded. He sees a folly in those programmers who spend their careers simply doing what they already know, instead of learning and solving new problems. He calls this “mercenary programming”. He says that instead of focusing on Farmville, cat picture platforms and general corporate programming, that engineers should instead look to “social-minded and innovative problem-solving.”
His talk reminds reminded me of a quote by Richard Hamming, the author of The Art of Doing Science and Engineering:
"In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. Of course, you seldom, if ever, see either pure state."
Essentially Yegge is asking engineers to be scientists as well. As software finds higher integration in our daily lives, universities and colleges are turning out more engineers than scientists, primarily to serve an industrial demand. This scenario creates the problem that Yegge is describing: that a plenitude of programmers is busy solving trivial problems, and hence the potential of computing is not being met.
He admits that he does not fully practice what he is preaching, however that he is taking concrete steps to mend that fact. In fact, to show he is serious, he actually quits his job on stage, that being the first instance of his boss learning the same fact. He says that he had just recently signed up for a “cat picture project”, by which he likely means Google+, but soon finds himself disillusioned with it enough to want to quit. He then announces that now, once a week, he sits down with his wife to “study” - to learn something new, or to read books he hasn't read before. He urges his audience to do the same, to dedicate at least a few hours every week to reeducating themselves, and taking an interest in important problems. One slide of his talks about “starting a culture change” which refers to self education of “infrastructure and scaling”, and “math, data mining and bioinformatics” to solve these important problems.
He notes that while most organizations today are interested in building easy to sell software which has little depth, there are some (such as O'Reilly Books) which do put a stress on what he calls important problems. He suggests that since the current conference was about open source software (rather than something like iPad conference,) he did believe that the people in attendance have an interest in working on the big problems, but they do need to break out of “code mercenary” lifestyle to embrace this fully.
According to him, if we had the source code for the Human genome, then we could easily discern cures for medical conditions like Cancer. So the “open source” he talks about is a metaphorical one, in which information is available freely and without restrictions. He says that if you look at all the open source code in the world as data, then it would come down to perhaps a couple of terabytes, which is apparently smaller than some of the larger data sets at Google. But the number of problems that require open solutions are very many.
Though this talk was fairly high level, it helps me affirm two important points about my own view of the open source world.:
* Most open source projects do provide a developer with an opportunity to work on “important” problems. The larger majority of corporate programming happens to be on software with a short life-span which other than making the rounds for a couple of years won't contribute much to the world.
* The importance of 'free as in freedom' is a fundamental concept of the Free and Open Source movement. As Yegge mentions, solving hard problems require some cross-training in expertise, and hence software needs to come without a prescribed usage.
==David Eaves' “Saving Open Source Communities With Data”==
