I find the story of Linus Torvalds’ upbringing in Just for Fun to be both interesting and fairly inspiring. He seems quiet and unassuming, not the type of person to have a wild and enthralling life. But I still found the account interesting; he (or his co-author) has a way of telling seemingly mundane stories in a compelling way.

I was not surprised to see that the spark for creating Linux (arguably the most successful open-source project ever) was the same as many other open-source projects: to scratch his personal itch. He made a lot of quality-of-life improvements to his Sinclair QL, and he learned more about assembly and threading by writing his own terminal emulator for his new computer. Another common problem OSS developers face is difficulty modifying existing software that they use that was built without tinkering in mind, and Torvalds’ frustration with trying to tinker with an operating system with little documentation available and written in read-only memory. Software was also physically difficult for him to access, since the only option was usually waiting weeks for floppy disks to be shipped from somewhere like the UK. I have always been in awe of Linux’s creation and wondered how a single person could build a robust and well thought-out operating system from scratch in a short amount of time. But these factors, combined with someone as stubborn and hard-working as Torvalds, make it easier to see how a perfect storm of situations and people led to the creation of Linux.

Linus’ story shares a similar arc with that of other well-known computing pioneers such as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates: an exposure to computers at a young age, a strong work ethic, and good timing. But his motivations and methods are very different from many of the high-profile computing figures of the second half of the twentieth century. At the beginning, Torvalds was not physically located in a hub of innovation like MIT or Silicon Valley, which brought like-minded people together and made it easy to share work and hear about the latest trends. Instead, he was in Finland—which was as a country, as he said, a pioneer of emerging technology, but no Silicon Valley. But he was still able to amass a large and dedicated community mostly over the Internet, which nowadays has become the standard medium for open collaboration. Linux has no gleaming, expansive corporate headquarters housing hundreds of thousands of employees, but rather one man in an unassuming office coordinating volunteers.

I want my story to be closer to Linus’. I don’t crave much in the way of fame or glory, and ideally I will be able to do work on projects that I genuinely enjoy, rather than just doing work at the whims of my bosses. The feeling of completing a large-scale, useful project purely by my own motivation would be extremely satisfying, I think, and far better than a paycheck or a promotion, although I do of course recognize that any job will entail its fair share of unenjoyable projects. This is not to say that Linus is perfect, however; I hope to be much easier to work with than he is (or was, possibly).