I am here to talk to you non-believers about The Wisdom of James Mickens. At least those of you who are software developers or would vaguely identify yourselves as “computer scientists”, whatever that might mean.
James Mickens offers his timeless insights for free, because he loves you and he wants you to succeed. Please enjoy the undeniable masterpieces which are collected below.
Danger. Adventure. Cryptic error messages. These are some of the things that inspired me to become a computer scientist. I’ve been a legendary hacker for 98% of my life, but there was a brief period when I did not possess the sum totality of human knowledge. In those formative days, I made mistakes, just like you. I wandered the streets, coding for cheap thrills, dereferencing NULL pointers in front of the police and daring them to arrest me. I used exponential running time algorithms when linear alternatives existed, because you can still raise venture capital for an app that only does half of what it should do before it crashes and wedges your entire phone. I proved that P equals NP, and then I gave the proof to an extra from “Blade Runner” in exchange for what I later discovered was not, in fact, a lock of Nicolas Cage’s hair. I used object-oriented programming languages but only called static methods because abstraction is oppression and only The Man uses virtual function tables. I’ve lived a thousand lives, and I have the carpal tunnel syndrome to prove it.
If his style appeals to you, you are hereby called upon to stop whatever you are doing and read his articles. He has several of those, all available for free on his website (see the earlier link). All are a mix of good insights and hilarious humor, and I can heartily recommend reading them.
My personal favourite is The Night Watch:
A person who can debug a device driver or a distributed system is a person who can be trusted in a Hobbesian nightmare of breathtaking scope; a systems programmer has seen the terrors of the world and understood the intrinsic horror of existence.