The Importance of Nurturing Software Communities at the Academic Level

I found this recently while going through my documents, it's something I wrote last November on one of those days where I was just inspired to write and it's definitely something worth sharing.

Recently reading an article about Ray Ozzie this paragraph jumped out:

In his classic book Computer Lib/Dream Machines, Ted Nelson describes "a seething community of dozens of smart people working like blazes on the project." Ozzie was desperate to be one of them. "I just had to see what was under the hood," he says. "I begged, begged, begged for a job and was eventually hired at like $1.75 an hour." It became the hub of his campus life. "All of us would have gotten higher grades if we had spent less time there," says Len Kawell, a fellow undergraduate who also worked on Plato. "It was such a fun place—a 24/7 party atmosphere, with people writing applications, playing games, sending email, all sorts of stuff. And Ray was definitely one of the hot programmers."

For those that don’t know who Ray Ozzie is, he’s the mind behind some applications that the current generation might not know about but revolutionized software, such as Lotus Notes, and currently is the Chief Software Architect at Microsoft (one half of Bill Gates old job).

So why exactly did that interest me so much? It brought up some of the few good memories from my college years. What’s said in those quotes completely parallel the atmosphere back at our lab, there was people socializing, playing games, writing software and the people most passionate about software (myself included) would have probably done much better academically if so much time wasn’t spent there. Yet spending so much time there made us infinitely better than if we had spent the same amount of time being book worms.

Then things completely changed. Some people higher up believed that the lab resources weren’t being utilized well and that it should be pretty much the same as one of the engineering labs. So strict rules were implemented around when the lab was supposed to be open and when it should be closed, access was restricted via electronic cards, and the thing that dealt the worst blow, the brightest people who had been at the center of the lab for years were systematically pushed away.

Now here’s what some people will never understand because they will never experience that feeling, software labs are unique because people don’t go there just to “work”. And while you can make the argument that a lab purpose is just that, a place to get work done that’s completely missing the big picture. When you have a place where you bring together bright and passionate people not only will you attract similar people but you inevitably brilliant ideas will get incubated and everyone that’s part of it will get exposed to broader ideas that push their abilities to their full potential. And at the end of the day, isn’t this what college is supposed to be about, educating people and turning them from an unpolished chunk of stone to a sharp professional and individual?

If you had a chance to have a deep philosophical discussion, would you rather have it with the likes of Plato or a frustrated philosophy grad who earns a living doing something completely unrelated to his major because he was never passionate enough? The answer here is a no brainer, yet the consequences of trying to fit things into a mold for which is absolutely wrong with them is that today’s Platos are not around to push and encourage the younger prospects.

At a higher level the argument holds true for every field not just the software field. However, being that this field is still relatively new and usually coupled with other fields it’s affected too often by people not realizing the uniqueness of it. In retrospect it really makes me sad how some decisions that were made by people that were just not qualified and carrying out personal vendettas destroyed what was the breeding ground for what could have been the next Ray Ozzie. My hope is that the next generation of developers gets to experience being a part of such a community that will empower them and push them to the pinnacle of their abilities.