Subject: My Evolution as a Programmer - Part I - The Pre-Elpas Years

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 14:20:02 +0200 (IST)

Hi prestigious hackers,

I took the liberty, this morning to write the first chapter in a
pseudo-book I'm writing about my evolution as a programmer, that describes
the adventures I encountered working as a software engineer in various
places and occasions.

The first chapter (available as Perl POD and all of its derived formats:
HTML, Text, LaTeX, etc.) is now written and available here:

http://vipe.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/prog-evolution/

Some of you may find it amusing or something that brings fond memories of
the old DOS and Windows 3.11 days. Others may find it as boring as any
auto-biography. I can't promise anything in advance.

If you think I'm starting too many projects that I don't have enough time
to work on all of them - you're writing. But I'd rather pursue my own
interests than be forced to work on a project that does not interest me in
the moment. ESR says in CatB that it works better this way. (and he's a
living example, as he has more OSS projects, papers and other bits and
pieces on his homepage that I can count on both hands).

Anyway, enjoy or not! And criticism and flames are always welcome.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

There is no IGLU Cabal! They all became as self-centered, ego-maniacal and
megallo-maniacal as the writer of these lines. Thus, they shyed away
people who did not like self-aware, self-loving and ambitious people like
that, despite the fact that they were perfectly productive and contributed
a lot to society out of their own free will.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        [email-masked]
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/

He who re-invents the wheel, understands much better how a wheel works.

---

From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: 15 Jan 2003 21:47:22 +0200

Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]> writes:

> [ESR] has more OSS projects, papers and other bits and

Well, most of those are in maintenance stage, not development...

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | [email-masked]

---

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2003 06:23:44 +0200 (IST)

> Well, most of those are in maintenance stage, not development...

You are right about that. Some of my projects are underdeveloped. But many
of them are in pretty OK condition. Some of them are incomplete, but
usable as well.

Of course, he does not have day-job and earns his money from consulting,
publishing books and other gigs like that. I OTOH have to study EE in the
Technion, which takes a _lot_ of his time. We'll have to see how his site
now compare to my site when I'll be at his age.

Other sites of personal people which are filled with useful information:

Rick Moen
Linas Vesptas
David A. Wheeler
Joel on Software (heheh, could not resist)
Paul Graham

RMS' site is something that I'm usually quite scared of. All this
political call for action. I don't mind him having a section about that.
But it's at the front of the page.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

---

From: guy keren <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2003 09:18:09 +0200 (IST)

> pieces on his homepage that I can count on both hands).

shlomi, if you keep taking examples from ESR, you'll end up being an ESR 
yourself - soemone who goes around, talks alot, and does very little. if 
your wish is to be a talker - go ahead. just don't be surprised then when 
people get tired of your talking about drop your mail to /dev/null, and 
avoid your company - cause the talking route often leads to that.

if i wanted to write 'all the little bits and things i did' on my home 
page, i'd bet it would be much larger then yours. all the things i 
started, but could not finish. but that's not interesting, and not useful. 
the ability to distinguish the important and meaningfull things you do 
from the useles and meaningless things - is a good quality. otherwise, 
you're just littering up the web, and making it harder and harder to find 
_useful_ stuff on the web. 

> a lot to society out of their own free will.

well, you've stoped being productive a while back, and seem to be 
turning into a nacrisist. you should try to avoid that path. don't let 
open-source go up to your head so quickly. some humility could be in 
place. 

lets just take your latest report, the one you titled as telling about 
stallman's lecture in IBM petach-tikva lately. there was 1 paragraph about 
the lecture itself - 1(!) paragraph, of about 3 lines. then there were 4 
questoins from the Q/A sessoin, 2 (50%) of which were...  yours. all the 
rest was how you got there, who you got there with, how hard it was 
finding the parking lot, how you got back home, when you got back home, 
etc. this is demonstrating a dangerous transformatoin you seem to be going 
through. and the reason i write this in public, is because you keep 
publicing your transformation process all around - and quite often right 
here.

please, for the sake of the both of us - stop that. go back into being 
productive, and let your actions talk for you a little more. you're 
wasting your time and your life otherwise.

-- 
guy

"For world domination - press 1,
 or dial 0, and please hold, for the creator." -- nob o. dy

---

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2003 15:53:52 +0200 (IST)

> avoid your company - cause the talking route often leads to that.

I don't see ESR as being unproductive. He certainly has quite a lot of
software on his homepage. (fetchmail is very useful, he wrote termcap) and
also has Advocacy papers. I don't see them as being unproductive either. I
also don't have an obsession (or try not to have one) with being
productive.

> _useful_ stuff on the web.

I do distinguish between that. There are many things I started and are
simply lying around on my hard-disk. The things that exist on my homepage
are useful and fairly complete. Sometimes the stories are in the midst of
being written, and I release incomplete versions because I still like to
receive some feedback. But Freecell Solver, LM-Solve, gradient-fu, MikMod
for Java , the Math-Ventures page, my fortune files, my Corel-Draw art
stuff, the Haifux lectures, The Enemy and how I helped to Fight it, the
One with the Fountainhead are all complete and usable as is.

I don't put any ad-hoc junk I wrote or thought of writing there.

> open-source go up to your head so quickly. some humility could be in

_I_ stopped being productive? From when? I worked on the Syscalltrack
web-site recently, read the Camel Book (which taught me a lot I did not
know about Perl 5), started working on Quad-Pres 0.8.0, worked on the
Freecell Solver site and integrated it into kpat. Before then, there were
others. Please don't make such generalizations which even contradict the
fact.

I do admit that I have periods of unproductivity where I just write
E-mails, or surf the web (or do my homework) all day. So what? What is
wrong with that?

As for humility: once when I was younger I tried to be humble. I really
did. I did not tell anyone about my achievements deliberately, when I did
I try to underestimate their significance, etc. It made me feel bad and
confused.

Then I read about Neo-Tech and Objectivism and realized that being aware
of your self worth and being proud of it, is not a bad thing. So now I'm
proud and I'm proud of it. I occasionally tell people of what I did, do my
best not to brag about it, but don't underestimate its importance either.
When I come up with a new insight or technique that simplifies things for
me, I congratulate myself for coming to it. I feel much better knowing my
self worth and letting people know that I do.

Note that I try my best not to brag, which isn't always successful.
There's a difference between bragful and proud. ("ga'avtan" ve"ge'ee" in
Hebrew). Of course, "I'm Humble" is a paradox, so I do not claim to be
one.

> finding the parking lot, how you got back home, when you got back home,

The report may have been prejudiced. It's just that some prestigious
Linux-ILer asked me to write a report about it to the mailing list and I
typed the first thing that came to my mind in pine. Maybe I should have
known better or let other people look at it and criticize it beforehand.

> publicing your transformation process all around - and quite often right

A dangerous transformation? At the moment, I'm in an Euphoric state, which
does affect my thinking and speaking behaviour. Generally, after an
Euphoric state I approve of most of what I did and decide then, but my
thoughts pattern is still irregular.

> wasting your time and your life otherwise.

For the record, I spent yesterday's afternoon and the morning of today
getting the first Freshmeat release of LKMB[1] out. It was nice sitting
in front of gvim hacking on Perl code. But beforehand, I spent a lot of
time thinking about it, writing SPECs, whitepapers and roadmaps, and
talking to people about what they think and what they need from CLAN as a
whole. Granted, there is still a lot to do, but it's a start.

I wrote my memoirs because it was the thing I wanted to do yesterday's
morning. I'd rather not write them when I'm 70 years old because then I
might forget all about them. Plus, I wish to live indefinitely so writing
some of my past experiences now or when I'm 70 will make little
difference. (and I don't plan to become more cynical as time goes by). If
you want to read them, fine. Else, I do not force you to. They are just
there on my web-site. I would not think less of you if you wrote such
yourself.

Granted, they are of less consequence than working on the CLAN code, and
if I had "priorities" I would have delayed them. But that's what
structured procrastination is all about. I'm now at vacation and follow my
whims.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

[1] - The Linux Kernel Module Builder

---

From: Orna Agmon <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2003 19:51:56 +0200 (IST)

-- 
Orna.   |  http://tx.technion.ac.il/~agmon

ascii smiles are for weenies. ;-) 
                        -- Muli Ben Yehuda

---

From: Orna Agmon <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2003 19:56:17 +0200 (IST)

> there on my web-site. I would not think less of you if you wrote such

Usually, the point of writing memoirs is passing on your experiences AFTER 
they have gone through the filter of time and consequences, when you are 
old and wise, and can tell better what is important. Also, the people 
whose memoirs are read, are those who have accomplished a significant deal 
in their lives, or passed through special experiences.

At the age of twenty something, this is not often the case. 
-- 
Orna.   |  http://tx.technion.ac.il/~agmon

---

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2003 20:12:15 +0200 (IST)

> At the age of twenty something, this is not often the case.

Very well, so consider them my late diary. I don't care. I just feel a
desire to put them down.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

---

From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: 19 Jan 2003 09:09:43 +0200

> This should go in a sig file, together with:

A signature of a former colleague of mine used to read: 

"Now I am spending all my time trying to become more productive".

---

From: "Ron Gidron" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2003 22:48:49 +0200

Shlomi,

This e-mail thread has been one of the most intriguing ones I have
personally read on this list (much more interesting to me personally then
book reviews..).
Guy wrote: "don't let open-source go up to your head so quickly. some
humility could be in place. ", I think he could use some of the same
medicine but that on the side here is the point: while I personally really
don't care about the order in which you learned all the programming
languages in the world (**joke**), your posting still got me interested
enough to go to your web site and YES, I'm impressed!! your web site is
interesting, useful, funny and I think you deserve some congratulations for
it rather then jealous remarks.
Beivrit "Yshar Koach"

Ron.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Shlomi Fish" <[email-masked]>
To: "Hackers-IL" <[email-masked]>
Sent: Saturday, January 18, 2003 8:12 PM
Subject: Re: [hackers-il] My Evolution as a Programmer - Part I - The
Pre-Elpas Years

> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> [email-masked]
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>

---

From: guy keren <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2003 02:07:45 +0200 (IST)

> it rather then jealous remarks.

perhaps you have interpreted my mail the way you did, because you haven't 
read "Shlomi Fish - a history"  ;)

-- 
guy

---

From: "Ron Gidron" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2003 07:37:03 +0200

----- Original Message -----
From: "guy keren" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2003 2:07 AM
Subject: Re: [hackers-il] My Evolution as a Programmer - Part I - The
Pre-Elpas Years

> read "Shlomi Fish - a history"  ;)

I did not mean to offend you...