However, the most important person in my gang will be a systems programmer. 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. The systems programmer has written drivers for buggy devices whose firmware was implemented by a drunken child or a sober goldfish. The systems program- mer has traced a network problem across eight machines, three time zones, and a brief diversion into Amish country, where the problem was transmitted in the front left hoof of a mule named Deliverance. The systems program- mer has read the kernel source, to better understand the deep ways of the universe, and the systems programmer has seen the comment in the sched- uler that says “DOES THIS WORK LOL,” and the systems programmer has wept instead of LOLed, and the systems programmer has submitted a kernel patch to restore balance to The Force and fix the priority inversion that was causing MySQL to hang. A systems programmer will know what to do when society breaks down, because the systems programmer already lives in a world without law. https://research.microsoft/en-us/people/mickens/thenightwatch.pdf?repost=true
Posted on: Sun, 24 Aug 2014 12:51:32 +0000
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