Jack Of All Trades

It used to be that there was a neighborhood handyman who seemed able to fix most of the day to day problems that crop up in all our lives. He was the person who knew simple plumbing, some carpentry, a bit of auto mechanics, maybe knew how to fix the radio, and later the television, and often offered sage advice on how to raise your kids, and where the best place to plant the rose bush was.

While you were always free to take his advice or reject it, it was nice to know that it was there. It was even nicer when your sink was unclogged, your favorite broken chair was repaired, and when the radio quit making those awful noises every time you turned it on. Life has become so complicated that there aren't really a lot of tasks that a neighborhood handyman can do. It also doesn't pay too well. We'd still benefit from someone who knew how to do the simple stuff. Too often we hire a plumber, or a carpenter, or an electrician, when the problem was actually simple enough that a handyman could have done it.

What is truly required is a group of multi-talented people, able to step in at a moment's notice, fix or assist with problems, and who will then go on to the next problem. I propose to create a core group of just such technicians, who can best be called hackers. For proper explanation of the term hacker, please see the excellent paper "Technology and Pleasure: Considering Hacking Constructive" by Gisle Hannemyr, published in the online journal First Monday (a peer reviewed journal dedicated to publishing original articles about the Internet and the Global Information Infrastructure. This truly scientific journal expands the frontiers of academic publishing by combining the traditional values of peer-reviewing and strict quality control with publication on the World Wide Web.

"Hackers" are identified as a specific subgroup of computer workers. The history of the hacker community is told. The explicit and implicit ideologies expressed through hacking is analyzed and presented. Computer artifacts of origin both inside and outside the hacker community are compared and the embedded properties of the resulting artifacts are inferred. Hacking is discussed in the context of being a method for system development. Finally, it is argued that this system development method under certain circumstances may yield superior software artifacts.

The Open Source movement has achieved great momentum this year, and part of that momentum can be traced to a paper written by Eric S. Raymond, which has undergone various permutations, including this version.

This group is not intended to replace current methodologies and standards, but rather to complement them, and to demonstrate that there are many good approaches to problem-solving. It currently exists, albeit not in any official form, and demonstrates a proof-of-concept that is a worth while example of this very different approach to programming and development.