Carpe Diem
This wasn't exactly the post I had planned for the 13 loyal readers when I started kicking the tires of this site again. That'll come, but I saw this morning that Rentzsch has announced this year's C4 on his site, along with the list of presenters.
I pretty much see them when you do, as it's Renzsch's baby and aside from saying "Sure, when?" over beer and fish I have little involvement. It's a neat list of people, and last year was so much fun -- or what I remember of it after the hangover cleared -- but I'll go on about having Actors on the brain since, the awesome couple with the custom blue shirt, the patient PGP Mormon and how Zach and Justin kept me alive another time.
However, if you're still on the fence and looking for a reason to go this year, I can honestly say you'll see something you've never seen at a conference before: I'm going to punch Vinay Venkatesh in the face.
You can only see that at a user-driven conference.
You'd be forgiven for assuming I'm joking, but I'm entirely earnest in my intentions, as I take the decision as to whether someone deserves a punch in the face very, very seriously. They have to be flagged in my head as a generally slimy and opportunistic individual, and it has to be weighed against spending a few nights in jail, and medical costs if they happen to have weak teeth or cheekbones. Which is why the list can be counted on one hand, and most of them live in Hawaii. You've really, really had to make it worth my while.
Every field has a few things which are anathema, because they screw everything up and tarnish everyone else. In the scientific field, this would be the falsification of data to further one's career or agenda. In the literary field, it would be plagiarism, which is a tougher nut because a publisher has to first care, and have been exposed to the original work to realize it is plagiarism. Plagiarism would be high up on any coder's list, but the additional problem with plagiarism in the context of coding is that you often aren't privy to the science, just the results, so it's doubly insidious.
Life is short, and these opportunities are generally rare, as a dev community's natural immune system will often take care of them, or a company's when they're promoted into a meaningless management position somewhere as a last resort so they'll stop screwing everything up at the development level.
When one comes across them, one may spend hours writing a long, detailed analysis showing exactly what occurred and when, but sometimes you just don't care enough and simply flag them in the back of your head to lay out if and when an opportunity arises, followed by a pithy phrase such as "Don't steal code."
Not everyone in the different dev worlds can be expected to know everyone else, nor their history or what they've been caught doing before. If you can talk a little of the talk, and have a modicum of social engineering skills -- which are essentially just a few manipulation tricks -- you can get surprisingly far in many an industry burning bridges behind you as you hop from group to group and project to project before you're really forced to produce. And you always have an explanation for why it wasn't your fault, or you didn't actual claim what you claimed.
No one in IRC is really going to question what you said you've done if they're old apps they've forgotten about, never seen, or barely run anymore -- and if you happen to hit the one in a million where they do, you can backtrack and "clarify," then find a new group or company that doesn't know you. Nor will they dig to find out why you were asked not to come back as an intern at Apple after a short stint on the installer team, nor why you (as far as I know) are still blacklisted from working there in the future (whereas I would be blacklisted for different reasons, such as punching a presenter at a conference in the face), whether most of the sample code you used to show as your own (and was removed from your site) was originally done by someone else with headers and copyright and method names changed.
And no one will check your remarkably liberal sprinkling of GPL code into closed sourced works-in-progress with copyright removed and method names changed, which I'm sure is the kind of thing that got shown to a potential employer. Especially in a market that is starved for talent and bodies at a reasonable price that aren't already working at Apple, Google, or the Mac BU -- or has decided they aren't working at or for another company for a reason.
However, I personally know enough about Mr. Venkatesh and his modus operandi through enough people I trust, and my own experiences with him, that if presented with him in my immediate physical proximity I'd feel a duty to take a swing, while hoping to god that even if VMWare is desperate enough to hire anyone off of IRC who can open XCode.app, they're auditing the hell out of whatever he eventually hands into them both for quality and other's work.
I'll notify the lawyer, and will be bringing enough cash for a reasonable bail, however considering this will most probably occur in the proximity of several hundred witnesses, and potentially be videotaped, unless the judge is a serious geek there's a high probability I may well be otherwise occupied for the remainder of the weekend, causing me to miss the discussion panel I agreed to lead.
However, in the case of my being otherwise occupied for the weekend, have no fear -- you'll still get your panel via a short list of stand-ins, along with an extra topic to discuss.
Posted by drunkenbatmanMay 15, 2007, at 07:48 AM
