Great Hackers

Ordinary programmers write code to pay the bills. Great hackers think of it as something they do for fun, and which they're delighted to find people will pay them for.

I don't know if I'm a great hacker, but I'm a good hacker. And I love that I get paid for what I do... which is why I was up at 4:45 this morning and worked for about 3 hours. Not because I was getting paid for it... since I've already got in way too many hours this week. And not because someone asked me to do it... since the problem I was working on was something that no one asked me to do, but just something I thought needed to be done. And besides... it was a cool thing. Someone did a transactions per second comparison between a home-grown query system and Oracle, and they had brushed aside MySQL. I had heard it was good, light-weight and fast. I've never done any MySQL programming from C++... but how hard code it be? So I wrote a program to create 10 million rows of data, and another program to do 10 thousand random queires. Then I loaded it all up and tested it. I got some impressive numbers. In any case, the point being, it wasn't that I was getting paid for it, or that someone asked me to do it... it was just a cool problem and something that sounded fun. So I did it :)

And I just got a promotion recently... which goes to prove, find something you really love, that you are good at, and start solving problems. Eventually someone will notice, and you'll start getting paid, fairly well - for something you'd do for free if you didn't have to earn a living.

One final note - I know I've posted stuff from Paul Graham before - probably this article. But if you are into programming at all, or want to know what makes them tick, you should read Great Hackers. And if you've read it before... go read it again. I consider myself a hacker - as it defines hacker. And I consider the best people I work with hackers as well. If you're going to program, be a hacker. Doing it as a job is just a drag - and anyway, it really drives the hackers nuts.