James Mickens Quotes
I’m a huge fan of James Mickens. A prolific computer scientist, he has to be one of the field’s funniest writers and speakers.
A collection of some of my favorite quotes:
Essays
The Night Watch
All of these people will play a role in my ultimate success as a dystopian warlord philosopher. However, the most important person in my gang will be a systems programmer. A person who can debug a device driver or a distributed system is a person who can be trusted in a Hobbesian nightmare of breathtaking scope; a systems programmer has seen the terrors of the world and understood the intrinsic horror of existence. The systems programmer has written drivers for buggy devices whose firmware was implemented by a drunken child or a sober goldfish. The systems programmer has traced a network problem across eight machines, three time zones, and a brief diversion into Amish country, where the problem was transmitted in the front left hoof of a mule named Deliverance. The systems programmer has read the kernel source, to better understand the deep ways of the universe, and the systems programmer has seen the comment in the scheduler that says “DOES THIS WORK LOL,” and the systems programmer has wept instead of LOLed, and the systems programmer has submitted a kernel patch to restore balance to The Force and fix the priority inversion that was causing MySQL to hang. A systems programmer will know what to do when society breaks down, because the systems programmer already lives in a world without law.
The Saddest Moment
With careful optimization, only 14 gajillion messages are necessary.
Mobile Computing Research Is a Hornet’s Nest of Deception and Chicanery
The real problem with mobile devices is that they are composed of Satan.
The Slow Winter
…because in those days, you could XOR anything with anything and get something useful.
This World of Ours
Security research is the continual process of discovering that your spaceship is a deathtrap.
To Wash It All Away
That is the saddest programming concept that I’ve ever heard, and I am fluent in C++.
Talks
On writing
From People of Systems & Architecture: James Mickens:
Every sentence in a paper must serve a purpose. If it doesn’t, you must get rid of that sentence.