Cottage Computer Programming (1984)

ylee•about 3 hours ago

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.)

_doctor_love•42 minutes ago

What do you do for work if it's not writing code? I'm always fascinated by the non-paid-professional-programmers who frequent HN.

ylee•25 minutes ago

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.)

cestith•about 2 hours ago

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.

EvanAnderson•about 2 hours ago

Paul Lutus recently commented in this thread that linked this (and other) articles of the era: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830191

II2II•11 minutes ago

Thank you for linking that since it sort of answered one of my questions: what would a person who lived in the backwoods of Oregon to escape the distractions of the world think about computers bringing the distractions of the world into their home?

Cottage Computer Programming (1984)

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