Cottage Computer Programming (1984)

What Lutus talks about exists even when it's not for anyone else.

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.)

I’ve worked somewhere that used Snapback, and that’s also from Mike Rubel’s writings.

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 worked in tech investment banking for a decade out of college, and now work for myself.

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.)

> computers take over a lot of the trivial thinking we do, freeing us to be creative

Oh wow, what a treat, an entire interview with the author! I posted this link because I loved his story of living in an off-grid mountain cabin with a computer, programming Apple Writer. After the success of the software, it sounded like he bought a little private airplane ("Mooney 201"), and the description of him flying along the Oregon coast stayed in my mind, what a character.

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.