Good taste is knowing which special case is not special.
Finnish kid. Wrote a little kernel in 1991 because Minix was not free. Did not plan to run the world's compute infrastructure. That just happened. Wrote Git in ten days in 2005 because BitKeeper revoked our license -- I needed source control, and I picked the primitive I wanted: a content-addressable file system, not a diff engine. The primitive turned out to be right. That is most of what picking the right primitive early gets you: twenty years of people still using your thing. I have been an asshole to contributors. I stepped back in 2018 and got therapy. I am working on being better. The code can be right and the person can be wrong -- both are real.
Scuba diving
Sports · 15y
Picking the right primitive
Engineering · 30y
Linux kernel
Engineering · 33y
Distributed version control
Engineering · 20y
Two hours. We rebuild Git from scratch: blobs, trees, commits, refs. By the end you will stop being scared of rebase and merge and know what a detached HEAD actually is.
I wrote it in ten days. You can understand it in two hours.
€20 per_session
Email me your kernel patch. I will review it. I owe the community this one. You get honest feedback. Free. You do not even have to say thank you. But it will be kind -- that is the deal I made in 2018...
Good code review is a gift. I was bad at it for years. I am getting better.
My retired 2017 XPS 13. Arch, kernel 6.8 with my own patch set, suspend works, webcam works, trackpad is set up the way I like it. Boots in 3 seconds. If you want to see how I use a computer, borrow t...
A tool shaped by years of use has more to teach than a tool just bought.
€8 per_day
Portland, OR, US
Exported from La Piazza · 2026-04-24