Tech Geek Quotes

People will forget what you say, they will forget what you do, but they never will forget how you make them feel.” —Dr. Maya Angelou

It helps to live around interesting people, and not necessarily people who do what you do. I feel a little incestuous when I hang out with only writers and artists, so I enjoy the many filmmakers, musicians, and tech geeks who live in Austin. Oh, and food. The food should be good. You have to find a place that feeds you—creatively, socially, spiritually, and literally.

Geeks = Know more about computers than their computer teacher, so everyone comes to them for computer problems. Nerds = Have no life and only worries about school, no one talks to them. Jocks = Know a lot about sports but not much else. Geek's Wife: Completely depend on the geek for tech support. Tend to be pretty good looking. Nerd's Wife: nonexistent Jock's Wife: only there for money, most likely having an affair with another jock See Geeks are the best!

another approach to the creation of software emerged. It was pushed by one of the diehard denizens of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and Tech Model Railroad Club, Richard Stallman,

there are no jaded, bored people in the high-tech industry, in the land of really good hardcore geeks. They all have a kind of intensity about what they’re doing that makes it impossible for them to be bored or passionless. They are pretty driven, and they get a lot of joy from what they do, and it comes through,

At their worst, alpha geeks can’t let anyone else get any glory without claiming some of it for themselves. They are the origin of any good ideas but had no part in creating the bad ideas, except that he knew they would fail. The alpha geek believes that every developer should know exactly what she knows, and if you don’t know something, she will gleefully point out your ignorance. The alpha geek can be very rigid about how things should be done and closed off to new ideas that he didn’t come up with. Alpha geeks get very threatened when people complain about systems they built or criticize their past technical decisions.

THERE ARE EXTRAORDINARY librarians in every age. Many of today’s librarians, such as Jessamyn West, Sarah Houghton, and Melissa Techman, have already made the transition and become visionary, digital-era professionals. These librarians are the ones celebrated in Marilyn Johnson’s This Book Is Overdue! and the ones who have already created open-source communities such as Code4Lib, social reading communities such as LibraryThing and GoodReads, and clever online campaigns such as “Geek the Library.” There are examples in every big library system and in every great library and information school. These leaders are already charting the way toward a new, vibrant era for the library profession in an age of networks. They should be supported, cheered on, and promoted as they innovate. Their colleagues, too, need to join them in this transformation.

values of commons-based sharing and of private enterprise often conflict, most notably over the extent to which innovations should be patent-protected. The commons crowd had its roots in the hacker ethic that emanated from the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club and the Homebrew Computer Club. Steve Wozniak was an exemplar. He went to Homebrew meetings to show off the computer circuit he built, and he handed out freely the schematics so that others could use and improve it. But his neighborhood pal Steve Jobs, who began accompanying him to the meetings, convinced him that they should quit sharing the invention and instead build and sell it. Thus Apple was born, and for the subsequent forty years it has been at the forefront of aggressively patenting and profiting from its innovations. The instincts of both Steves were useful in creating the digital age. Innovation is most vibrant in the realms where open-source systems compete with proprietary ones. Sometimes people advocate one of these modes of production over the others based on ideological sentiments. They prefer a greater government role, or exalt private enterprise, or romanticize peer sharing. In the 2012 election, President Barack Obama stirred up controversy by saying to people who owned businesses, “You didn’t build that.” His critics saw it as a denigration of the role of private enterprise. Obama’s point was that any business benefits from government and peer-based community support: “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.

Did something happen to you in the past that still haunts you today? Do you feel anger or bitterness about what happened? When we permit it, anger, bitterness, and resentment can hold us in a crushing grip, hijacking our lives to no positive end. The cruel paradox is that anger, bitterness, and resentment hurt only the person harboring those feelings and the friends and family members close to him or her.

Ask yourself, as you interact with your fellow humans, “Am I being as kind as I possibly can be?

And then there was Asher. If he hadn’t been a total tech geek, Asher might have fit in at school. With brown hair and eyes and a height that was average for an eleven-year-old,

Comic geeks know there are four types of superhero classes: alien savior, tech soldier, science-accident survivor, and vigilante. Superman, born under the red sun of Krypton, is of the first variety—an alien savior. So far, we have two entities (SUPERHERO and SUPERHERO_TYPE) and a relationship (SUPERHERO has a SUPERHERO_TYPE).

Among the many private initiatives in this field, the latest, launched in the summer of 2012, is aimed at middle-school female students in New York. Girls who Code is a seminar, hosted by a startup (AppNexus in 2012), where 13-17 year-old girls learn how to write software programs, design websites, and build applications. Mainly, they learn that these subjects are fun and accessible to them, and not only to male computer geeks. “Girls who Code is not just a program, it's a movement to close the sexist gap in the technological sector,” explained the program’s two organizers, Reshma Saujani and Kristen Titus, to attendees of a big gala that took place on the evening of Oct. 22, 2012 on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The occasion was to celebrate the success of the first edition of Girls Who Code and collect additional funds in support of the initiative. The first 20 “graduates” of the course spoke of their experience and their dreams for the future, while sitting at the gigantic table in the NYSE’s Board Room. Tomorrow, one of them could return as the CEO of a high-tech business, and perhaps ring the bell on the trading floor to inaugurate her company’s Initial Public Offering.

This means that our outward-facing marketing and PR efforts are needed simply to reach out to and capture, at the beginning, a group of highly interested, loyal, and fanatical users. Then we grow with and because of them. If they are geeks, they are at TechCrunch or Hacker News or reddit or attending a handful of conferences every year. If they are fashionistas, they are regularly checking a handful of fashion blogs like Lookbook.nu or Hypebeast.

The programmer community is thick with stereotypes: greybeards (old guys with vast knowledge of arcane programming languages); script kiddies (unskilled hackers causing chaos with off-the-shelf programs) and ninjas, rockstars and cowboys, all three a way of describing mercenary, high-skill individuals brought in to clean up messes and untie the hairiest programming knots, though not necessarily play well with others.

As people who serve other people, we can use that knowledge to craft our interactions based on the approximate age of the person with whom we’re dealing.

Just as dogs often come to resemble their owners, it seems that programming languages end up reflecting the temperaments and personalities of their creators in some subtle ways,

Their products ultimately reflected their real-life behavior. Instead of making a technology of understanding, we seemed sometimes to be making a technology of the opposite: pure, dehumanizing objectification.

The power these kids wield right now as programmers is individually unprecedented, perhaps even in human history, and they’re getting shoved into the workforce before they’ve had the opportunity to develop into thoughtful, whole citizens,

summed up Zuckerberg’s attitude perfectly, noting, “Between speech and truth, he chose speech. Between speed and perfection, he chose speed. Between scale and safety, he chose scale.” That idea of “mistakes were made” in service to the bigger idea would carry throughout Zuckerberg’s career and bleed into Facebook’s culture. This approach was distilled in the “Move fast and break things” posters that adorned the company headquarters early on. While this motto was a geek coding reference to software, it was a telling choice. The aim was to “break things” instead of “change things” or “fix things” or “improve things.

Medieval Armed Combat as Universal Metaphor and All-Purpose Protocol Interface Schema (MACUMAPPIS). Since Medieval Armed Combat was the oxygen they breathed, even mentioning it seemed gratuitous, so this got shortened to UMAPPIS and then, since the “metaphor” thing made some of the businesspeople itchy, it became APPIS, which they liked enough to trademark. And since APPIS was one letter away from APIS, which was the Latin word for bee, they then went on to create and trademark some bee- and hive-related logo art. As Corvallis patiently told Richard, it was all a kind of high-tech in-joke. In that world, API stood for “application programming interface,” which meant the software control panels that tech geeks slapped onto their technologies in order to make it possible for other tech geeks to write programs that made use of them. All of which was one or two layers of abstraction beyond the point where Richard could give a shit. “All I am trying to say with this memo,” he told Corvallis, “is that anyone who feels like it ought to be able to grab hold of our game by the technological short hairs and make it solve problems for them.” And Corvallis assured him that this was precisely synonymous with having an API and that everything else was just marketing. The problems Richard had in mind were not game- or even entertainment-related ones. Corporation 9592 had already covered as many of those bases as their most imaginative people could think of, and then they had paid lawyers to pore over the stuff that they’d thought of and extrapolate whole abstract categories of things that might be thought of later. And wherever they went, they found that the competition had been there five years earlier and patented everything that was patentable and, in one sense or another, pissed on everything that wasn’t. Which explained a lot about Phase 3.

The Netscape offering changed that equation. Originally, Netscape planned to sell 3.5 million shares to the public at $14 each, a price that valued the company at about $500 million. Given that Netscape had posted only $17 million in sales—sales, not profits—during the previous six months, a half-billion-dollar valuation seemed highly optimistic. But not to investors looking for the next you-know-what. Netscape’s roadshows were mobbed; tech geeks who had never before bought a stock wanted to own the Navigator. One technology stock analyst said getting a session with Netscape’s management before the offering “was like getting a one-on-one with God.”3 With demand overwhelming, Netscape and Morgan Stanley, its underwriter, increased both the size and price of the offering, eventually selling 5 million shares at $28. Still, demand far outstripped supply; investors placed orders for 100 million shares, and Morgan Stanley had to decide which clients to favor with the limited number of shares it had available. “They don’t get any hotter than this,” the Journal reported the morning that Netscape opened for trading. With so much unmet demand, it was obvious that Netscape would begin trading far above the $28 offering. After struggling for hours to set a price, the Nasdaq’s market makers finally opened Netscape at $71 per share. It rose as high as $75 before settling back to end the day at $58.25. At that price the company was valued at more than $2 billion—one hundred times its trailing sales.

Magical thinking underlies the I-don't-want-to-know-how-it-works-I-just-want-it-to-work view of technology. That may be a viable attitude for business people who don't want to take the time to understand their desktop computers, but it makes for a lethal combination when geeks and suits try to build businesses together.

effort to create “technology parks” and “high-tech centers of excellence.” Such architect-designed places often feel so artificial and sterile that they end up as vacant white elephants. According to Paul Graham, a successful American programmer and technology investor, “A government that asks ‘How can we build a Silicon Valley?’ has probably ensured failure by the way they framed the question. You don’t build a Silicon Valley; you let one grow.”28 The reason for this is that the type of people who are attracted to high-tech centers are looking for a particular environment that combines a sense of freedom, authenticity, social interaction and character. If you want to attract geeks, said Graham: “[Y]ou need more than a town with personality. You need a town with the right personality.

It’s not just the location that makes a place a digital hothouse, it’s also the living arrangements. In recent years there has been a resurgence in communal living among ambitious young tech entrepreneurs. This is not just a matter of saving money before they strike it rich, it’s about cross-fertilization of ideas and the opportunity to inspire each other.