I don't get it. This guy's resume says he's a double major of math/CS from Berkeley with high honors -- and apparently he's worked on pretty hardcore engineering projects.
I've created a Linux distro of my own. Original and not a fork.
See articles on website. Geared towards CLI engineers.
Patched and built about 1,800 packages myself. Supported
and customized standard distros as well.
Double Bachelors in Math and Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley.
High Honors and Honors. Worked with Open Source
since the 1980s. Led small teams in startup and similar environments.
Considered to be good at writing and analysis of problems.
Experience includes: Agile, Assembly, Back-End, BSD, C, CSS, Debian,
FOSS, GIMP, HTTP, Java, Linux, Mathematics, Mint,
MySQL, Octave (similar to Matlab), Open Source, Parser, Perl, PHP5,
Python, Recruiting, Regex, Shell, SQLite3, Support,
TCP/IP, Ubuntu, UNIX, Tcl/Tk, Teaching, Training, Transcoding,
VPS, Writing, XML, XSLT
What is wrong with Silicon Valley today that a person like him can't get a reliable job, and therefore is unable to live with medical healthcare, a reasonable place of residence, etc.?
edit: on the bright side, now that this post is on HN frontpage, I hope someone seeks this guy out and gives him a job. From what I can grasp, the quality of his code is pretty damn good.
Anecdote: The smartest, intellectual, brilliant software developer / computer programmer I've ever come across taught Logic II as an adjunct. He had his PhD in Philosophy and could drown us with Second Order of Calculus so fast we didn't know how it happened. He was so gracious it was almost comical. He could look at the board, look at the class, and sort of attempt to explain but it was clear he could see things ways we couldn't. I don't wish to go into much detail but I will state he - single handed (which I believe) - built an entire Regional Real Estate software suite from scratch over the years and was constantly upgrading it to keep with the times. No maintenance mode junk. He was the real deal.
Scoff if you like, but I hired that guy. He's a fellow at Adobe now. They bought his startup.
We interviewed a Busuness school Finance senior to help on our COMSTOCK satellite feed parsing project.'Do you know C++?" we asked. "Yes" he lied, then "Can I come in over the weekend to get started?" How enthusiastic! Sure!
Turns out he spent the weekend studying code, learned to program C++. I didn't see him for a few weeks, then consulting on his code over something I mentioned "This would be better allocated". "Yeah, I wondered what the pointer stuff was about". I was astonished he'd come so far on guts and smarts. I explained malloc, pointers, he was off again.
I hate this divide between "applications" programmers and "systems" programmers. Really good systems programmers will either have worked on applications themselves or will work in close proximity with application programmers. And really good application programmers will have deep knowledge of the systems stack under their app.
Which category would you put Linus Torvalds into? He wrote Linux, but he also wrote git. How about Jeff Dean? He wrote MapReduce and much other core Google infrastructure, but he also played a large part in the indexing & serving system. Guido van Rossum? He started Python, but he also wrote Mondrian.
Might anyone be able to comment on his employment in all these years?
Every time I've come across this article it's seemed to me that the work he's done, whilst notable, is an entirely reasonable and very achievable amount to have completed over the course of the at least 20 years that he has been developing.
If he has held a full-time job that takes away the majority of his time or something similar (as many here have) then I could understand these codebases being particularly notably huge. Otherwise, as has been commented by others here, this level of productivity, whilst admirable, seems to strike me as similar to many, many programmers working around the world - in their cases simply behind closed doors, instead and not working on their pet projects, but on those chosen by their employers.
Because he managed to combine the job, open source work, and to a large extent I expect, social life, into the same thing. That's the chicken and egg problem; you can do it once you 'make it', but getting there is tough without significant sacrifice.
edit: on the bright side, now that this post is on HN frontpage, I hope someone seeks this guy out and gives him a job. From what I can grasp, the quality of his code is pretty damn good.
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