nswatlan cse40842 blog

In Linus Torvalds’ essays this week, he discusses his upbringing through college and the his creation of Linux. First I’ll focus on his upbringing in this blog. Linus describes himself in a pretty self-deprecating way in the beginning of “Birth of a Nerd” which I thought was a little upsetting, calling himself “ugly” and having an “atrocious taste in clothes” (p. 3). I thought he looked pretty regular in the video we watched in class, but I wasn’t there in Finland in the 1980s so I can’t speak on that or defend him to himself unfortunately. He goes on to describe his personality as the opposite of “charming”: “a nerd. A geek.” (p. 4). These first few points he makes about himself reminded me a lot of Paul Graham’s essays about nerds in high school: being geeky or nerdy because of their interests and not caring about/taking interested in anything else (like taste in clothes, friends, etc). Linus explicitly says now he just wears vendors’ merchandise so he doesn’t have to make any decisions about his clothes (p. 5).

Overall, I would say I had quite a different childhood compared to Linus, but there were a few things he wrote that I related to. First, in describing Finland, he wrote, “the optimism lasts about three days but the snow remains for month after bone-numbingly cold month” (p. 9). This reminded me greatly of the South Bend winters I’ve experienced the last 3 ish years (Finland is probably snowier and colder but relatable nonetheless). I was on the dance team in high school which was a fall and winter sport (yes, sport) so I was kept a little busy with practices and competitions, but I still related a little to Linus’s idea of programming being “an indoor sport that got [him] through winter” (p. 9). Not necessarily with programming since I didn’t touch a programming language until second semester freshman year, but with my general schoolwork in high school. It definitely kept me busy inside in between dance team commitments. Another relatable story was his mother calling him a “low-maintenance child” (p. 16). Unlike my siblings, who my parents had to force to do their homework, they really left me to my own devices (which worked out well) and very rarely had to intervene or check in with my academics. I probably needed more than “a dark closet with a computer” and dry pasta like Linus, but I related to that idea in the academic sense. One last experience I related to was the idea that “it was fun to spend time in the coffee shop near school” where “you would go there instead of phys ed” (p. 25). I always went to coffee shops in high school to do work instead of class senior year. Unless it was a really important class I was a chronic skipper – a habit I’ve grown out of – but there were like three starbucks’s near my high school and I was at at least one of them nearly every day.

Now I’ll move on to Linus’s creation of Linux. He was motivated to create his own system after buying Minix in early 1991 and discovering everything he didn’t like about it (terminal emulation is the first thing he mentions). So he started to write his own terminal emulation package, learning as he went along. He worked alone, but showed his work to his friend Lars at school. He didn’t have many resources but he bought a computer from a small computer store in January of 1991 which he used to create Linux. He didn’t have much money either, but eventually there was a crowdfund to pay off his computer.

I find Linus’s story really interesting especially considering his humble beginnings in Finland. He seriously is a genius to be so nonchalant and just create Linux at age 21. Very very impressive. Pretty cool story. I think whatever I end up doing will be not very impressive based on my beginnings but probably predictable which I’m fine with as long as I’m somewhat happy with life in general.