Cottage Computer Programming (1984)
atariarchives.org
atariarchives.org
I have never been paid to write code, and my formal CS education is limited to AP Computer Science, and a one-credit Java class in college. I wrote 20 years ago a backup script implementing Mike Rubel's insight <http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/> about using `rsync` and hard links to create snapshots backups. It's basically my own version of `rsnapshot`. I have deployed it across several of my machines. Every so often I fix a bug or add a feature. Do I need to do it given `rsnapshot`'s existence? No. Is it fun to work on it? Yes.
(I've over the years restored individual files/directories often enough from the resulting backups to have reasonable confidence in the script's effectiveness, but of course one never knows for certain until the day everything gets zapped.)
https://metacpan.org/dist/Snapback2/view/scripts/snapback2.P...
The 2 is I think because an earlier incarnation was by Art Mulder. There is also a Python implementation by apparently yet another person, which appears to be independently inspired by Mike Rubel’s writings.
https://github.com/diegocortassa/snapback
There are also rsyncbackup, rsyncmachine, https://rsnapshot.org/, https://github.com/jonaslu/rsyncrotatingbackup (inspired by http://www.dbourget.com/software/remote-backup.pl), and several more with seemingly the same original inspiration.
I majored in history and Spanish at Columbia, which is associated with at least two other people who have had notable computer-related careers/sidelines and eminent non computer-related careers: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen> and <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Mendelson>. (Not that I would put myself at their level.)
It was super fun! You can shoot him an email from his website and he's definitely worth chatting with. He's on hacker news sometimes as well.
He has many wild stories! Steve Jobs melting his software by leaving the disk out in the sun. Being homeless. Working at the JPL. I think he had a hard childhood and went his own way.
It feels like the tech scene used to be populated by more people like him, who didn't quite fit in with society and had strong personalities. I'm sure they still exist, just harder to recognize in the bigger crowd. Anyway, I enjoy meeting and hearing stories from colorful old timers like him. Thanks for mentioning the interview, I'm looking forward to listening to it.