{"id":27,"date":"2019-04-19T22:06:30","date_gmt":"2019-04-20T02:06:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/justin-peek\/?p=27"},"modified":"2019-04-19T22:06:30","modified_gmt":"2019-04-20T02:06:30","slug":"not-another-nerd-origin-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/justin-peek\/2019\/04\/19\/not-another-nerd-origin-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Not Another Nerd Origin Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

The cake<\/span> title is a lie.<\/p>\n

Linus Torvalds has been a bit of a legend to me. Not in the way that I aspire to be like him or deify him, but I\u2019ve really only known him for his achievements, mainly creating Linux. That\u2019s what I associate him with. That\u2019s why I get a bit shocked each time somebody mentions he also invented Git. I\u2019ve heard that detail many times, but it always surprises me because I just think of him purely as the creator of Linux. Candidly, I thought he was an elder by this point, if not dead. For this reason, I was absolutely intrigued by the story of his upbringing.<\/p>\n

Torvalds’ story plays out like many historical nerds among him. He was a nerd from a young age and was inspired by a computer owned by his family to pursue his interests. I\u2019m sure this trope is used not just to tell the story and draw pity, but to get the reader to connect. Frankly, it\u2019s a bit played out by now. However, Torvalds takes that and uses it well. Even though he describes his nerdy lifestyle and his social ineptness, he doesn\u2019t blame that on his interests. He blames his interests on his interests. He connected to math and physics early in life and was able to use a computer in his childhood.<\/p>\n

Notably, Torvalds’ family is comprised of journalists and writers, and he tongue-in-cheekily talks about how he\u2019s the black sheep in that respect. However, if this wasn\u2019t written by a ghost writer, Torvalds’ writing is very well developed. During Birth of a Nerd, <\/em>he employed the use of second person point-of-view and the present tense. I was genuinely interested by his life at this point.<\/p>\n

Additionally, it was super interesting learning about his life in Finland. There\u2019s something about learning about the technological landscape in America time and time again that just burns me out. But seeing it from a completely different perspective was enthralling. And I don\u2019t know much about growing up in the Eastern European countries, it all seems pretty homogeneous to me, but the Torvalds were a black sheep in regard to the Finnish population due to the family speaking Swedish, something I never even considered.<\/p>\n

The Finnish background is not just a part of Torvalds’ story, but I also think it was a huge factor to his legacy. He describes the dreariness of Finnish winters, forcing indoor activities and a form of stoicism on him. This I could connect to much more, living in Northern Indiana my entire life. Staying inside and tinkering about on my computer are some of my favorite memories. I\u2019ve even taken to Stoicism myself, even if that is different from the Finnish stoicism.<\/p>\n

This lifestyle led Torvalds to just take a genuine passion to computers and programming. This is why Torvalds is so different from the Steve Jobs type. The fruits of his programming were not for a product, but to learn and create. When he tinkered with his Sinclair QL, he was just learning how to interact with the machine and make it do exactly what he wanted it to do. His passion for Unix was genuine drive. While I don\u2019t doubt that Jobs and Gates didn\u2019t actually enjoy programming and learning how the computer worked, I feel like they had an extrinsic drive for money, while Torvalds took to it out of curiosity and little outside influence. Granted, this is a personal assumption, but if I\u2019m going to play couch psychologist on these 3 characters, those seem like a fair difference between them.<\/p>\n

Additionally, Torvalds’ story seems more communal. The Homebrew story gives off the impression of people trying to make the next Apple (ha ha). But Torvalds\u2019 work with the Minux newsgroup, Peter Anvin, Ari Lemke, et al. seems more like a love letter to helping people out. It seems like a much healthier basis for an open source community, much like the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT. Again, I don\u2019t really have a proper argument to this other than history and intuition, but that\u2019s that.<\/p>\n

While Torvalds\u2019 story is rather inspirational from what I have read, I don\u2019t want to mimic this. In some way, I do feel like I\u2019ve fallen out of love of programming and don\u2019t have the same drive that Torvalds\u2019 did. I can blame this a bit on the culture of Notre Dame, building minds and students suitable for careers instead of passionate minds, but I also am not a nerd in my free time. I don\u2019t love learning about hacking news or making computers purr. I love my friends and video games and movies and music. And I want that to be a part of my story.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m at a point in my life where I don\u2019t know which I want to pursue. I still have a wide net in my future. Part of me does want to follow my technological \u201citch\u201d, but that itch was created by my favorite movie ever, Her <\/em>by Spike Jonze. I don\u2019t just want OS1 to be created, but I want to personally be a part of that. I want the spread of user information to be spread properly. But I also make music as a hobby. Frankly, I used to want to go into production for a few years, but I\u2019m starting to realize that it should perhaps just be a hobby. But my other artistic passions are still there. Whether that is in the form of making music or making movies, I want to share my story in an aesthetic way. I have my foot in the door for technology, but not the arts. I also want the best for everyone and maybe go into politics someday. I would like to touch base on all of these passions, but I\u2019m more concerned with what\u2019s ahead of me and the uncertainty of it all at the moment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The cake title is a lie. Linus Torvalds has been a bit of a legend to me. Not in the way that I aspire to be like him or deify him, but I\u2019ve really only known him for his achievements, mainly creating Linux. That\u2019s what I associate him with. That\u2019s why I get a bit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3261,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/justin-peek\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/justin-peek\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/justin-peek\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/justin-peek\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3261"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/justin-peek\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/justin-peek\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/justin-peek\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions\/28"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/justin-peek\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/justin-peek\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/justin-peek\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}