I thought this was kind of funny:<p><i>What does annoy him is people misunderstanding his work - or "the technology", as he puts it. One example he gives is an article about him in which the journalist confuses Java and JavaScript (the former is a stand-alone program which can be accessed online, the latter is a browser-dependent scripting language)</i><p>I'd say that distinction between Java and Javascript is pretty wrong too ...
Key Takeaway : If you are <i>really really good</i> at what you do, companies will pay you to work out of home, writing Open Source code, from scratch, at your own pace, on your own terms.<p>For the rest of us there is always enterprise systems and cube farms. :-(. Yeah Ok I am just depressed at how much other programmers are better than me :-(<p>More seriously though, I wouldn't have thought that there is such a "market" for expertise in writing VM s. Of course you probably get to be that good by not caring how much of a "market" there is to doing the things you love.<p>"Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. " - PG in his essay "How to Do What You Love"
<i>Bak may be a computing genius, but he didn’t touch a computer until he was at university.</i><p>Wow. I wonder how many 10x programmers got their start in college.
And OOVM was the company that produced an embedded Smalltalk that was used in systems like speakers and stuff. I had always thought that's a pretty cool piece of work.<p>[Lars] Bak - "If you have say, a small router or a dishwasher you can upgrade the code while it's running, no reboot is required" (<a href="http://www.smalltalk.org/versions/OOVM.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.smalltalk.org/versions/OOVM.html</a>)
Next time, please point to print version: <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/03775904-177c-11de-8c9d-0000779fd2ac,dwp_uuid=a712eb94-dc2b-11da-890d-0000779e2340,print=yes.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/03775904-177c-11de-8c9d-0000779fd2...</a>
There's a question in the article if he has spent more than 10.000 hours - - I think he has. First, he holds a masters in CS (5 years at Aarhus Uni at minimum). He got his MSc in 1988 and has worked with VM's since then - that's 21 years of experience in implementing VM's. So really, there isn't an easy way to become really, really good at something ;-)
"Companies don’t really make money out of web browsers – the Explorers, Safaris and Firefoxes of the internet. So why is a new one so important to Google? Why invest time and effort in a free product that generates no income for the company behind it?""<p>That sounds false to me. AFAIK, Firefox makes a lot of money for Mozilla via the search field (via adsense), and other browsers certainly do the same.
I liked the part about long hours, in my experience the long hours crowed are only wasting time.<p>You come to work, you code, you leave that's as simple as that!
There is another less known but worth to mention project. There is a man, who wrote highly optimized (literally - he had counted every system call, every buffer) web server with proxy functionality - <a href="http://nginx.net/" rel="nofollow">http://nginx.net/</a><p>It is another example how one fanatical (and a little paranoid, of course) person could change the world. It is a brilliant work! If you will take a look at its source code - it is like poetry to those who understands.<p>This server is being used mostly on extremely high loaded adult or dating sites around the world.<p>It is also good example of how to do optimizations in general - modify a weakest (a slowest) component, test and measure, change the next one.
<i>What does annoy him is people misunderstanding his work – or “the technology”, as he puts it. One example he gives is an article about him in which the journalist confuses Java and JavaScript (the former is a stand-alone program which can be accessed online, the latter is a browser-dependent scripting language). We both laugh at the mistake, and for a moment I feel like Bak and I have clicked.</i><p>Is technology <i>that</i> hard, or are journalists <i>that</i> lazy? both?