Some thoughts...
Mon, Jan 1, 0001About passionate people …
I’ve attented the TorDev meeting 2016 in Valencia & some parts of the IFF also taking place right after it in the same city. That was my first dive into this world of open source communities / hacktivists / hardcore systems hackers etc. Man, it was worth it ! To be honest that was a lot to process and I felt a bit over pressured since I was not very involved at that time in those communities and I’ve put been in their sessions and group meetings just as if I were an equally important contributor so.. that felt a bit wrong at first sight. Of course, I’ve told my little me in my head to go out there and talk to people about what you think, this project, the way this is done and so on, but this feeling of being small was very present throughout the first days, mostly during the TorDev meeting. Finally I got to talk to one or two people about the projects I work on and how this might be / or not / a good idea to try that on Tor, and then I’ve had kind of a goal, so I guess that helped me relieve a bit from that pressure.
What I find crazy about all this is the gathering of people coming from all differents kinds of background, places and have all different kind of skills. They gather together and make something great out of it. They can because for most of them, they’re one of the most highly talented, kind & patient people I’ve ever met, all at the same time. This kind of atmosphere you have here is very different from what you can experience elsewhere (for me at least). It’s like you feel you almost already know the people in the place, even if you don’t, so you feel relaxed and you laugh with them and such, and in the same time, you talk about hard problems with them like you would do small talk with your friends.
One of the big thing that has been poking my mind a lot is that most of the people I’ve met have their own identity. They dress some specific way, they think a very peculiar way, they behave in a peculiar way, they are specialized and sometimes not. They do what they like and they like Tor or any other privacy-security systems and they do something useful because they actually like it. What’s the best motivation if not passion ? And because of that, they actually get out of the typical good citizen picture that we’ve been taught from childhood. From my point of view, they seemed to get in their own path actually.
All of this had led to a series of questions about what I want to do in my life. Not what would be the best to do, but what I really want to do ? How do I construct this inner identity ? Would it be by following your inner choice (i.e. instinct) in your life instead of what seems to be the best, or the more reasonable ? I know a lot of people that actually fit very well in their environment they’ve been given and don’t try to change it, but rather simply try to enjoy it. For my part I find it difficult to fit in the system I’m in now. After some more thoughts, the reason I come up with is that I haven’t really followed my instincts throughout my life. I’ve basically tried to do things I like but in a way that fits the system regardless on how I would have done it otherwise. These questions seems very high-level but actually can be applied for very practical stuff:
- Should I go to work the way I want (large hippie pan or colorful hairs or no hairs or with flipflop or whatever) regardless of every other people that do not behave in any other way that the regular pants + shirt ? There’s not even an actual rule about it, but the people have the tendency to judge you from the way you look (in the place I’m in). If you’re not an actual genius, you don’t have that excuse to not behave like this. I don’t know why geniuses get to behave the way they want but not us? It seems childish but I do feel this way in the place I work & live.
- Should I fuck off of the IT guys and install my own Archlinux on the Mac they’ve been given to me ? I actually tried this for a few month now and I miss my Linux machine with my sweet tiling w.m… (I’ve already decided that I’d do it anyway^^)
- How should I choose the project I want to work on, on my free time. Should they be useful for the community even if I find them boring at first sight ? Should I choose them according to the most passion I have about them ? That’s a tough one for me now because I think both are essentials but my coding-free-time is very limited. Get deep into other’s people code and fixing bugs OR implement a cool stuff with a cool language that may or may not be used later by the community if this proves to be adequately coded ?
- Regardless the utility vs usefulness question, in what kind of projects do I want to be involved in ? Of course, it seems great to take part in projects that protects privacy or circonvemt censorship. And of course, it seems to suck to work for boring projects like implementing a accountability software in Java (I’m not doing this). Most of the time you just do project because they sound fun or you like the technical side (that’s the one most often used).
After all of this, nothing is resolved and I’ve only have more questions in my mind but it has opened a whole new world of perception / possibilities that I did not really thought about before. Every change is good, so I take it it’s one way of creating your own identity that to ask those questions…
Peace.