Subsurface
Every time I find myself thinking I am the centre of the universe, I do one of two things:
- I look at the sky and imagine myself floating into space, naked (I can assure you, only 5 minutes of visualising yourself in front of the sun, without the protection of mother Earth, keeps your feet on the ground)
- I read a Wikipedia page about some famous highly skilled person who should be considered the centre of our universe in my opinion. It helps me remove myself from my focus.
It happened to me again recently, and this time I picked Linus Torvalds. There are some wizards out in the world, quietly turning it upside down, revolutionising our way of living. And Linus is a prominent member of this category. I realised it was the first time I actually read his Wikipedia page. I knew (like everyone) that it’s him who gave us the Linux OS kernel, effectively spawning an era of intense technological development in the Western world. I mean, NASA is now flying a helicopter with Linux on MARS! I also new that he created Git, another major player in the software industry (it actually go even beyond software), out of frustration, but I didn’t know about another major project he created: Subsurface. Also created out of frustration, just because…why not? On Wikipedia, you learn that he “developed an interest for scuba diving in the early 2000s”, which is the niche addressed by that software. I am not a scuba diver myself, but I know a good friend of mine who is, and another one who is tempted to do it, so it made me think about them, and any other scuba diver who may stumble upon my blog (don’t laugh, you don’t know the ways of the randomness of mother Nature!).
So there you have it: if you are a scuba diver, you can promote Free-as-in-Freedom software by ditching your proprietary divelog software for the superior (because Linus creates superior tools) FOSS alternative that is Subsurface!
Let’s finish with a nice quote from Sir Torvalds (emphasis mine):
Don’t EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle.
That’s giving your intelligence much too much credit.
I already learned about this in my youth, with Naruto. Yes, Naruto training to master Rasengan, see by yourself:
Who said Mangas/Animes don’t teach you anything?