Lesson: Intro to Hacking with Greg Osuri

Step: #2 The Culture: Why is it important to understand the culture of hacking?

People write open source software, I think, for several reasons. One of the reasons being this quote from Linus Torvalds way back when they asked him, "When you build Linux are you trying to take down Microsoft or IBM?" That day, he said building the kernel was the only way he could get recognized among the people that he truly respects and enjoys working with. So that was a clear recognition motivation for hacking. And it's pure joy when you build something and you see that work in the real world and you see people using it. It's pure joy, I would think, when you hack. If you think about it, hackers are the types of programmers that consider programming as a hobby. They take vacations to go hack. That only exists in this career, I think. So obviously, there is something fun about doing vacations and hacking, and it's a lot of fun. Sure, equity and profits are a side product of the pure fun, but that is what it is.

Velocity is one of the takeaways, one of the best things you gain of the hacker culture. Speed is good, because people want that early validation really, really fast. And a startup speed is absolutely necessary, because of the burn cycles; you're going to have an X amount of cycles before you run out of money. Also building something and getting that instant gratification as soon as possible is very, very important to a hacker, because again that's tied to the joy that you get out of hacking. Building something and putting it in someone's hands and seeing them use it is just a different set of joy. I think that's a driving force to the speed in the hacker community.