It’s difficult to pin down exactly what a “hacker” is because the term has come to take on a variety of meanings and connotations over the past 50 years. I’ve always sort of seen those being labeled as a hacker fall into one of two different categories. The first category consists of coders who have malicious intent and are trying to exploit some nuance of a language or existing program for personal gain. I’d also include in this category those who are just trying to proof of concept hacks to expose weaknesses without actually causing any harm themselves. The other category is comprised of the curious hackers. Those who just try to see what they can build for the fun of it, those who test the capabilities of their hardware,  and the nuances of their software, but out of innocence and a thirst for knowledge.

In terms of attributes common between the two, this is what I can derive. A hacker is smart at a level of meta-cognition. She is painfully aware of her knowledge of the tools she has at hand, and uses the knowledge of those tools and perhaps other knowledge domains with the goal of exposing, proving, or discovering something. Whatever the goal is, the goal will cause some level of disruption. It could be as world-wide a disruption as a data breach or simply a disruption in one’s current level of knowledge about the world of computers. Because of this, I would not include a side project where you already know how to build the solution to be hacking even if you are doing so with speed or laziness of design, but a side project that presents new challenges which you have to be creative in solving and which force you to expand your current knowledge of coding has some of the second classification of hacking involved.

I think that “A Portrait of J. Random Hacker” brings up a lot of the stereotypes which surround hackers and I feel that although a number of are relatable to me, the more accurate ones pertain to the thinking patterns of hackers and their intelligence. Frankly I felt a bit insulted by the weaknesses listed in this article, especially the mention of being self-absorbed, intellectually arrogant, impatient, and unable to communicate. At Notre Dame, I imagine that more of us suffer from impostor’s syndrome than from inflated egos. I also would claim that most of our class of computer scientists and engineers are willing to collaborate and understand rather than look down peers and on other majors or fields of study. This seems to align with the article’s claim that we are not intellectually narrow, but the contrast I see between our students and the “hacker personality” described in the article is that we use these conversations not only as mental stimulation, but also as the basis for meaningful friendships.

I would not consider myself ever to fall into the first category of hacker (those with malice), and only occasionally do I fall into the second. When I take on side projects it is often with the idea of disrupting the current boundaries of my own knowledge, so that if I am not trying to prove a concept to the world I am at least learning about and proving it to myself. I often feel I fall more into the engineering and mathematical sections of computer science, as the article “Hackers and Painters” explains, than into the section of writing what the author calls ‘beautiful code.’ I think it better to consider robust systems and really enjoy the low-level, algorithmic thinking required for the statically typed C language, whereas the author here made it feel like high level code that works and is nice to read can be achieved with less intentional thought and purpose in typeless languages. Don’t get me wrong: Creativity and the view from a level of abstraction above typing is almost part of due diligence, and that considering unique and creative design decisions or code structures is important. On the other hand, though, for the high level languages to exist the lower ones must be there to support them and I see value in bringing the thoroughness of these lower level solutions to higher levels of abstraction.

I don’t think the implications of labeling myself as occasionally being a hacker are all that important, and so my reaction to such a label is simply, “Meh.” I am who I am, I do what I do, and I love about it what I love about it regardless of the positive and negative labels and stereotypes that it might bring upon me.