Rusty dabbled in Linux until 1997, when Dave Miller accepted his
partial rewrite of ipfwadm, called ipchains. This gave him the hubris
to tackle a complete redesign for 2.4, which resulted in the netfilter
framework, the packet mangling layers on top, and several howtos.
Somewhere in there he organized the first Australian Linux conference
(now linux.conf.au), and did some FHS work. In 2.5 he dabbled:
trivial patch monkey, futexes, per-cpu variables, and the module
rewrite. He has a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Systems, where
he created a Z80-based tictactoe robot which was smarter than him.
Hanging out with Smart People
The core Linux Kernel team are the best programmers I have ever worked
with; certainly off the "Industry Average" curve. Things which seem
to come to these programmers naturally often seem like lucky choices
to the rest of us. Linus calls it "taste", which is fairly
appropriate: bad taste is fairly clear, but "best" taste can be
debated ad infinitum.
How does a normal programmer get "taste"? Can it be learned? Can it
be judged other than "but it's obvious!"? Most importantly, how do we
judge interfaces, where those brilliant minds meet the code the rest
of us write?
In addition, there will be pretty diagrams, and the revelation of the
4th principal virtue of a great programmer.
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