We all just want to be cool

This is from the opening scenes of “The Social Network”. I am just going to go with the idea that everyone has seen it. If you have not then there is shame upon your entire family.

All kidding aside watch the clip. In it Mark creates a website which photos of undergraduate females rated against each other. So to get all the photos he does a little “hacking”. I will be honest here and tell you that I have probably watched that opening scene at least 75 times. I like the idea that I could do that. It has got me thinking that at some point and in some place, every programmer wants to be hacker.

It does not have to be illegal so much as able to do cool things with the powers we have. Namely computers. I think think that it is this drive to find cooler stuff to do or to find new, exciting,  and challenging things drive ourselves to learn.

Amir Rachum wrote an awesome blog post about "Flow" (here).  I think anyone who has ever worked on a problems know this feeling.  It does not have to be programming related for this to work.  Hell I will often find myself getting into a "flow" when I am cleaning my house (assuming I have a list of chores to get done and am ROCKING the iPod).  The idea of flow and hacking I think have their fingers locked together in a familiar embrace.  Yes a lot of productive programming takes place in this ethereal flow or zone.

I ran into a lot of this at the beginning of last summer.  I started a project where I was trying to data-mine horse racing post and results from the "Daily Racing Forums" website and store them into a simple database.  At the same time I was writing everything in Python at language which I had never worked with before.  So while I was trying to write up some html parsing code I was also trying to learn the language I was writing in.  It was during this time that I would be super focused and slip into the "zone".  We all know the feeling of setting down to add a couple of lines of code and the next thing we know 3 hours have past and it is WAY past your bedtime.  Yeah that was my last May.