Tinkering

I’m that kid who was caught red-handed with the radio in bits in my hands, screwdrivers scattered around. I can still remember the moment exactly, my Dad was none too pleased but not really angry either, chances are that radio was never going to get fixed anyway. I think he probably got a laugh out of me telling him I just wanted to see how it worked. I’m still like that but at this stage I’ve the cop to know that although I may be curious, I don’t necessarily have the chops for understanding the things I take apart — but hey, just because I can’t put it back together doesn’t mean I’m not allowed take it apart, right? I mean how’s anyone gonna learn how to put things together if they don’t take them apart, its a necessary part of play and of learning.

That moment with the disassembled radio as a kid had an important parallel later when, in the late nineties I discovered that there was such a thing as open source software and open source operating systems. At the time I was studying for the MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) and trying to get my head around the OSI architecture and networking. I could follow it in the book but knew that it wasn’t going to stick unless I got some experience. I also knew at this stage that I wanted to learn more about GNU Linux. So I got some scrap machines, literally scrap; machines that were clapped out and ready for the skip. I got a monitor and a vga splitter, an old switch and a bunch of ethernet cables. I put them all together and eventually set up a working network. At that time I was using mandrake and caldera as my favoured linux distributions, perhaps red hat too. Theses machines were wiped, formatted and rebuilt so many times, and each time I tried to do a little more, like getting connected to the internet or setting up the email client to talk to the email I had with my internet provider. ISPs didnt provide instructions for anything except Outlook Express then, probably still don’t but everyone uses web-based email now anyway. So I guess the point I’m making is that free software allowed me to learn by doing; to play, to break and fix stuff and to do a lot of things I would not have been able to do with the closed-source equivalent.

I was already in my twenties at this stage and although I was learning quite a bit from tinkering around with GNU Linux I also felt I had kind of missed the boat. A lot of the people I was working with had had a keen interest in computing from an early age, they’d had commodore 64s and ataris, they had subscribed to magazines and coded games in their teens, I hadn’t. I was a johnny-come-lately to computers and was probably too old to start learning to code. Besides the MCSE would probably do for now anyway and where would I even start in order to learn coding? In any case I wasn’t sure that programming was what I wanted to do. What I was sure about though, was that the nature of learning had changed.

I had learned GNU Linux by searching the internet, taking part in forums, sharing my experience and asking questions. Because of the internet there was no limit to what I could learn — it was as if the local library, with books and lists of courses was always open and there was a constant librarian willing to help. Any information I wanted could be searched and all I had to do was wait, and listen to the godawful noise of a 56k modem communicating over the dial-up connection. A fundamental change was underway and it was difficult to articulate the exact nature of the change, but the consequences could be described; information was now free, community would no longer be bound by space but range across interests, the traditional gatekeepers of knowledge were under threat because of the vast amounts of information available. I remember encountering wikipedia for the first time and wondering could it really work. Would some clowns not come along and edit nonsense information into it, how could this be stopped? And then realising that there would always be way more people acting in bona fides than otherwise.

The story of the creation of GNU Linux was fascinating to me; the idea that one guy could start working on a pet project that would then be picked up on by developers all across the world and ultimately lead to the development of the software that largely runs the internet. This demonstrated how the landscape had changed as a result of the internet. The four essential freedoms of free software as codified by the Free Software Foundation set the scene for the mushrooming of free software. A seminal work which really informed my thinking at this time was Eric Raymond’s ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ which argues for the bottom-up development style of free software like fetchmail and GNU Linux as opposed to the top down approach prevalent in the world of proprietary software. This model of development was made possible by instant global communication, by online collaboration, by the internet.

For me this was really exciting? The availability of information was now instantaneous, communications was global and instant, and collaboration on the scale of linux and wikipedia was possible. I had experienced this myself to an extent in learning linux and I was now preparing for the LPIC 101 exam (Linux Professional Institute Certification) using online resources exclusively. I still wanted to work in the area of IT but I no longer wanted to be a generalist, instead I hoped to be among the first to get a linux qualification and so get work that held greater interest for me. I no longer felt I was at the mercy of the giant corporations who controlled the world of software. With this new found open approach to software I’d be able to study the software right down to the level of the code base, to finally get my hands dirty.

I got my LPIC 101 and started looking around for work. I didn’t get the work that I thought I was interested in, but what I did get was an education in itself!