On how to acquire a hacking literacy.

If, like me, you entered the IT field coming from elsewhere, I recommend you develop a hacking literacy. What I mean by that is to develop the contextual understanding which surrounds anything there is to learn in IT. E.g.: don’t try to learn iOS development in a vaccum, but read about its lineage all the way back to NeXTSTEP and its roots in Objective-C. This is not about getting kicks out of learning computer science history. Learning a language / framework is much easier when you understand about how it fits in the broader scheme of things.

There is many definitions to what “hacking” means. In programming, a hack may mean a shortcut to get to the desired result via a somewhat obliquitous technique. In common parlance, it usually refers to a hoodie-wearing security specialist getting unauthorized access to a system. In this post, a hacker is someone who tinkers with technology. The “something” that is being tinkered on hopefully addresses a certain demand and will end up being picked up by others. Obviously, tinkering for the sake of tinkering is fine too.

Readings

If there is one place to build a hacking literacy then that place would be Hacker News (“HN” for short). Founded and maintained by the folks at YCombinator, it collects anything that might be of interest to hackers. The scope of what may enter a hacker’s interest is broad and is not circumscribed to strictly technological topics. For instance, the content found on HN gave me a better undertanding of accounting than a 6-month training I followed on the subject. The meat of HN is its comments section. I guess that the dynamic should be to consult the primary link bing reference by the story and only subsequently read the comments. Often I find myself going the other way round and heading straight to the comments section, as it is regularly more informative than the underlying piece.

HN has the UI of the old web and that is good. Generally, reading HN will teach you to keep things simple. One may even say that HN is marked by an asceticist approach to technology which I find refreshing. Autoplaying videos on a social media feed is the kind of things that gets frowned upon here.

The search functionality of HN is powered by Algolia and a dedicated subdomain allows you to search stories and comments easily.

A few vocabulary terms to navigate comment threads:

  • Author: author of what the url points to.
  • OP: original post / original poster.
  • parent: the comment above the current comment in a thread.
  • GP / grand-parent: the parent of the parent. May refer to the root of the thread.

Kharma points is the currency on HN. Kharma points are calculated as the number of upvotes a given user’s content has received minus the number of downvotes(Wikipedia). Kharma points can be earned through the submission of (high quality) blog posts and articles and the posting of (high quality) comments.

From the HN FAQ: Threads are closed to new comments after two weeks, or if the submission has been killed by software, moderators, or user flags.

Podcasts

When I learn a new programming or framework, I find it helpful to immerse myself in the context of that piece of technology. Podcasts are a great immersion technique. The information provided helps to fill in the gaps of the documentation and to tie bits and pieces together. More often than not, you hear the voices of the humans behind the projects you are using and it makes it easier to absorb it all.

Here is a few podcasts I can recommend together with their respective scope:

podcast scope
All Hands on Tech Pluralsight-affiliated podcast. Historically, Microsoft stack.
Android Developers Backstage Android platform. Interesting episodes on low-level components of the framework.
The Changelog Focus on open-souce projects.
Hanselminutes Podcast run by Scott Hanselman. Focus on dotnet.
Malicious Life Security with excellent host Ran Levi.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers Run by Graham Lee. Focus on programming practices. I also recommend the blog authored a.o. by Graham.