Day 1 at XP 2006 Conference

The day started today with a talk from Pekka Himanen about the Hacker Ethic.

His introduction on how the Open Source development teams are able to produce so much and so high quality code was interesting as it was rooted on his Learning Philosophy and how interaction between people can make a team/community much more productive than the sum of all individual parts.

The talk was very interesting as it contrasted the often “gray” and “dull” environments in many companies and the dynamic and enriching environments in Open Source communities (even if people don’t really meet face-to-face often or sometimes at all).

He also explained how a 12 year old can submit a patch to a problem on the Linux kernel that gets accepted. He explained that this happens not because that 12 year-old is particularly much better than all others, but because that 12 year-old starts with a passion to solve a problem, ask the questions on the NET and go on to build their solution on the knowledge of many other people in the community. They act as a synthesizer of the community’s knowledge and in the process learn a great deal about programming and the subject being handled.

This was a good example of how learning can be so much more effective in this type of communities.