So What Exactly Does Linus Do These Days?

What do you do when you wrote the kernel of the world's greatest operating system nearly two decades ago? Linus tells us:

My real "work" is not really writing code any more, and hasn't been for a long time. No, I worry most about the whole "flow of patches", and the way development happens, rather than so much about any individual piece of code I maintain.

So know we know: just like in any other job, he's ended up in management...

Insights into the Hacker Worldview

From David Miller, one of the most senior kernel hackers, comes this little story:

Say you've been doing nothing for the past few weeks except looking for a real nasty and hard to trigger bug. You think you're getting close and the one piece of debugging information is just around the corner, perheps the next build or the one after that will spit out the debugging message you need to find the bug. All the rest of your work is being blocked by this problem, you have to fix it.

You've been drinking coffee all day, and guzzling water as well.

So now you have to go REALLY BAD, you're about to pee your pants. What do you do? Do you go to the toilet and take care of things or you cross your legs as hard as humanly possible thinking "just one more build, just one more" for the next half hour?

If you're one of the ones who would go to the toilet you're not a programmer.

Hardcore Coding

I've never really had the urge to hack on the Linux kernel (not least because I am the world's worst programmer - Fortran, anyone?) but if I did, I'd certainly be using Greg Kroah-Hartman's Linux Kernel in a Nutshell. To both his and O'Reilly's credit, you can download a copy (cc licence), but obviously buying one would be a good idea, too, for all the obvious reasons.