Bob Mesibov

94 points
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Ulverstone, Tasmania, Australia

Bob is a "retired" scientist, still active in zoological research. He audits data for a scientific journal publisher and has published coding tutorials on the Linux Rain blog.

Authored Comments

I'm glad you found the article interesting, but you do seem to have missed a couple of my points. I certainly wasn't talking down coding for a living, which is why I imagined well-trained coders as "People who aren't interchangeable parts, and who expect to be paid what they're worth?" when working in enterprise. I know such people, they're well paid and they use open-source code at work.
My own coding is all shell scripts, AWK, web pages and the odd bit of javascript. You can find some of those scripts online in my Linux Rain tutorials and demos, along with my own solutions to coding problems that seem to be widespread (no easy solutions found by googling). Isn't that contributiing?

All true, and you could say much the same for art and craft as money-earners, and nowadays for science - the majority of science graduates have to find income in something other than science. In my experience, though, serious artists, craftspeople and scientists aren't in it for the money, but are driven by an urge to do something really amazing. I see that in open source coding as well.