A great Hacker

I've posted about "Norm" before, and lately I posted some stuff about great hackers. Norm is a great hacker. Yesterday at work, we were having a problem, found the defect in the code, and discussed in which releases we'd fix it, when it would be available to our production sites, etc. This caused Tim to post on irc:

Maybe we should just get Norm to patch it in the running executable in production

This based upon a story I told Tim about Norm a long time ago, and that we still occasionally tell. There was this production system that had an issue. Development got involved but could not figure it out. So Norm took a look. He didn't actually work on the system any longer, but had for a point in time. He figured out what was wrong, and also figured out how to patch the running executable in memory - while it was running, in production. He was in his cube right next to mine... All of a sudden he stands up, looks towards some cubes a few rows away and says "They must be all at lunch", sits back down and "patches" the exe.

All of a sudden the user's are saying "Hey... its working now." Support gets back from lunch and some folks are kind of mad - "Hey... did you patch production?" - Norm had this great little kid look, "Who me? Nope. BTW: You might want to fix the code in CM a this line."

Some folks were pretty upset that the customer's problem was fixed... cuz it was done "the wrong way" and it was done "in production".

Norm was (well and I'm sure still is - I just don't work with him any longer to know of his latest exploits) a great hacker because

• He knew his stuff..., extremely well
  
• He almost always cared about "what was right" and hardly ever cared about the red-tape, process, etc. that got in the way of doing the right thing
  
• He evaluated risk vs reward and based his decisions accordingly

Yeah... we could have made the change, and then tested it, and reviewed it, and made a new kit, and deployed it, and taken a system outage... or he could fix it in 30 seconds and have the customer's back up and running.

Way too often, process, management and fear of the unknown (by people who just don't know) gets in the way of "doing the right thing" - to me, hackers hate that.

Anyway, since it came up yesterday, I sent mail to Norm, telling him his legend lives on and why. He responded with:

we all did foolish things in our youth :-)
now I do them as an adult!

Another great hacker attitude. :)

Another reason Great Hackers want to work with other Great Hackers - they make you better. Not only in how they code, but how they think. It infects you. It causes you to think about the "right" thing, rather than the "proper" thing... Many times they are the same, but not always.