Raghu Mohan

For the longest time, game developers have been part of a closed community, mostly working for select organizations, specific target audience and on set technologies. Recent years have seen the community grow. The industry witnessed a sea of change with the smartphone revolution. Current scenario? The possibilities are endless.

With games like Farmville, Angry Birds, Temple Run and Candy Crush, games have become an integral part of our life. The audience is bigger now, with experiences going beyond the game itself. Earning a name, fame and even money isn’t rocket science anymore. If you have the right skillset and talent, the industry is more than willing to reward you for it.

Get ready for the opportunity of a lifetime.



Horlicks an iconic brand, in association with Hackerearth is looking for awesome developers like you. The task – design a game that is engaging for kids for the Horlicks Hack4Fun event. The game needs to be developed for kids aged between 6 to 14 years and should have ‘milk’ and ‘Horlicks’ as an integral part of gameplay. Needless to say, it needs to have strong brand integration opportunities.

The best judged game stands to win some of the biggest prizes ever given for an initiative like this. You can also look at your pre-built games with the same conditions i.e. opportunities of brand integrations.

While games for desktops and/or mobile platforms can be built, however, only mobile games are eligible to participate in the contest.

Prize details:

• 1st prize: INR 800,000
• 2nd prize: INR 600,000
• 3rd prize: INR 400,000
• First 50 entries get Hackerearth Swag (Tshirts, Pen Drives and Stickers) * **

Here’s your chance to associate with a renowned brand like Horlicks. This is your chance to shine.What are you waiting for? Submit your entries for Horlicks Hack4Fun hackathon to Hackerearth today.

* Terms and conditions apply

**Due to legal restrictions, this is not applicable for Tamilnadu

To the uninitiated, the word Linux is synonymous with open source. This is because Linux, an open source OS had rose to prominence. This is marked as one of the most important event of the free and open source revolution. OSes built on the Linux kernel run a huge chunk of today’s computing world.

It’s been 24 years since Linux kernel first emerged in a Minix newsgroup on Usenet. It popped as a post from a 21 year old programmer from Finland, who went by the name Linus Torvalds. He was building a “free operating system” which was just to be a “hobby”. According to him the OS he built wouldn’t be “big and professional like GNU”.

Today the Linux kernel has over 19.5 million lines of source code, powers 97% of all supercomputers in the world. Among the innumerate applications that use Linux, nuclear submarines controls, air traffic control systems, the Japanese bullet train operation are a few. Linux also powers over a billion smartphones and embedded devices.

But what made it so popular? How did the Linux kernel achieve such large adoption? To answer this question, you must research the history of Linux. Somewhere along the way, you will stumble upon a document, called the Cathedral and the Bazaar. This document, written by Eric Raymond, explores the reasons behind the rapid and widespread development and the subsequent adoption of the Linux kernel.

The Cathedral is a philosophy of building software. Before the explosive growth of Linux, Eric Raymond believed that important software needs to be built like cathedrals -

“carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time.”

Linux on the other hand, resembled something that came out of a loud, noisy and an unorganised bazaar. Linux opened its doors to anyone who wanted to contribute to the project. Everyone came with a different approach and agendas, and they came in huge numbers. How could a coherent and stable system ever emerge from such an environment?

Surprisingly, it did, and in an emphatic fashion. Linus Torvalds had built the largest community of kernel developers in the world. He wisely used his users as beta testers and ardently listened to them. He implemented user feedback rapidly and adhered to absurd release cycles (sometimes, 2 kernel releases a day!) and cleverly delegated ironing out the consequent issues and bugs to the several thousand co-developers. This stems into the infamous Linus law -

“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”

This up, up and away trajectory of the adoption of the Linux kernel in the last 24 years have been as a result of a few key factors -

An able founder

While Linus Torvalds' true innovation lies in community building, motivation and resource marshalling. Building a production quality OS kernel from scratch is no easy job. Even to this day, Linus has the most number of commits to the Linux project.

This allowed Linus to position himself as a universally accepted gatekeeper of for the Linux project, where he could give the project direction, and exercise his legendary community building and management skills.

Intel’s proliferation into the PC and server market

In the beginning, many of the Linux kernel’s functionalities, like task switching, used exclusive features of the Intel 386 processor. This meant that the Linux kernel couldn’t be used on any other piece of hardware. This was one of the arguments Andrew Tanenbaum, the creator of Minix, used when he called Linux obsolete

While the open source development model ensured that the Linux kernel was ported to all other major hardware platforms, the Intel x86 series of processors soon became widely used by PCs and servers, ensuring the relevance of the Linux kernel.

The Internet

By 1994, Linux had stepped out of its infancy and the Linux developer community had begun to leverage the internet to make the world its talent pool. This time period also saw the growth of the ISP industry and that gave rise to large scale adoption of the internet.

The internet became cheaper and easier to access and more developers were online, which helped the community grow. But more importantly, it gave Linus a vast and effective communication and collaboration channel.

Channeling egos

Today, 80% of Linux kernel developers are paid. However, in the early days of Linux, the story was very different. They were mostly volunteers. And volunteer motivation relies mainly on satisfying their egos.

Linus nurtured enough interest in the Linux project that hackers got an ego boost by contributing to it. Furthermore, he connected the developers’ selfish motives and channeled it to result in sustained corporation, that ensured rapid and cohesive growth of the project.

“A good hack is a solution to a personal problem”

While the open source method is a great way to build and develop software, it might not be the best way to create one. There must be a project founder, who floats an idea to a developer community. The community must find the hack interesting and believe that it has potential to be something great. From there on, the founder must continue to nurture interest in it, till it reaches a point of self sustenance.

At the end of the day, it’s all about the hack.

By 1991, there were quite a few endeavors towards making a free and open source operating system. Richard Stallman was working on the GNU project, but the Kernel that powered it, HURD, failed to attract interest from other developers. UC Berkeley built the Berklee software distribution or BSD, which was built from UNIX. But, BSD contained UNIX code that was owned by AT&T, and the company filed a lawsuit against the University of California for it. And then there was Tanenbaum’s MINIX OS - its source code was available, but you couldn’t modify and redistribute it.

All this, made a 21 year old in Finland want his own, free and open source operating system. And that, is how Linux came into existence.

"The Secret lives of Hackathon junkies"

The above link was intentionally put there. This article has been shared by many prominent hackathon goers. Being in the business of hackathons, I had to know what this was about.

The article is the experience of a journalist who was a part of a week long hackathon. She brings out some unspoken truths about the hackathon culture. They are -

• Nothing useful is ever created at a hackathon - Given the lack of time, direction and objective Hackathon fuels creation of Vaporware. Vaporware are short-lived hacks or software. Vaporware tend to evaporate post the hackathon, as nobody works on it.

• Entrepreneur doesn’t mean rich - The author talks about ideapreneurs, who’re passionate about starting up and probably know the valuation of the latest funded companies. However, this doesn’t mean that they’re well to do. In fact, many startup aspirants are broke all the time, they spend too much time at Hackathons, trying to build a billion dollar company.

• Hackers still need to keep their day jobs - It’s almost a follow up to the previous point, which is that building a company from a hackathon is next to impossible. She says so, quite eloquently, -
  

  “ The final secret of hacker culture is that Google is a black swan, a lightning strike, an outlier, a Goliath. Most hackers need to keep their day jobs.”

  
  

All these points are correct and very, very true. However, through the course of reading this article, one question that rose in my mind was- Since when was a hackathon about building startups?

The first hackathons were just a bunch of programmers trying to solve a problem. They hacked to build products for fun. They hacked a new language because they could learn something new.

One of the core concepts of a hackathon is creation over ideas. A developer’s time at a hackathon should not be judged on the prize that they won or the investor they met. It should be based on what you did there, what you learnt and what you created. Why do hacks need to be judged on its monetisation model?

Any regular hackathon goer, even the one who says that nothing useful is ever created at a hackathon, will also tell you that the amount of learning that they go through, at every hackathon, is much more than what they could ever do by themselves over a weekend.

A startup isn’t something that should be created at a hackathon. Businesses need to address a core problem and be able to solve it at scale. This needs great research. The idea needs validation. Other aspects need to be thought out too - operations, marketing, sales, team, etc, etc. Why would you want to rush this process and try to get it done over a weekend? It is my strong opinion, that startups need to be thought out and validated and a hackathon environment isn’t the best place to do so.

Hackathons have and should always be about building products. Let developers build fun things, without having to worry about its viability as a business. Let hackers allow their imagination to go wild. There is even a remote possibility that this idea could become a billion dollar company, but that’s not why it should be done.

HackerEarth, the company I work for, is in the business of hackathons. HackerEarth conducts at least one large scale online hackathon (about 3000 - 5000 developers participate in each one) a month. We are one of the custodians of this form of event. On these credentials, here are a few general rules of thumb to follow-

• A hackathon should always be about building something - It isn’t a hackathon if the “hack” isn’t given the highest priority

• A hackathon should be for programmers and developers - If it is for anyone else, make a distinction - marketing hackathon, startup weekend etc.

• Sponsors and businesses must not obstruct a hackathons core values - Figure out ways like AWS where sponsor branding and product adoption benefits the developer.

• Have good mentors and judges - Remember, most people will remember your hackathon for how much they learnt during their time there.

• Judge based on what was built and not what a hack could be - Hackathons should always showcase the builders. This should follow through in the judging too.

Prizes, wifi, food and all the other things are hygiene factors. You could outdo yourself in all of these aspects, and if your hackathon doesn’t adhere to the core philosophy of building, it will be for nothing. You will leave your developer audience disgruntled, and they most probably won’t come back to your hackathon.

And lets face it; a hackathon without developers, is just another b-plan competition.

Over the last 20 years the word "hacker" has been misconstrued by the media and by those who weren’t a part of that culture. Today, you see the word Hacker used in anything negative. The act of exploiting a technology product’s vulnerability is now called Hacking.

Why is this a problem? Well, to answer that, you must first understand the origins of the word Hacker.

What is a hack?

The use of the word hack has existed long before its current computing connotation. In the famous documentation of the Hacker culture, the jargon file, a Hack is referred to as

an appropriate application of ingenuity’. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it.

Before the age of computing, many clever things were considered a hack. Here’s a story that defines a hack in a non computer science perspective -

On November 20, 1982, MIT hacked the Harvard-Yale football game. Just after Harvard's second touchdown against Yale, in the first quarter, a small black ball popped up out of the ground at the 40-yard line, and grew bigger, and bigger, and bigger. The letters ‘MIT’ appeared all over the ball. As the players and officials stood around gawking, the ball grew to six feet in diameter and then burst with a bang and a cloud of white smoke.

“The Boston Globe later reported: “If you want to know the truth, MIT won The Game.”

The prank had taken weeks of careful planning by members of MIT's Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. The device consisted of a weather balloon, a hydraulic ram powered by Freon gas to lift it out of the ground, and a vacuum-cleaner motor to inflate it. They made eight separate expeditions to Harvard Stadium between 1 AM and 5 AM, locating an unused 110-volt circuit in the stadium and running buried wires from the stadium circuit to the 40-yard line, where they buried the balloon device. When the time came to activate the device, two fraternity members had merely to flip a circuit breaker and push a plug into an outlet.”

“This stunt had all the earmarks of a perfect hack: surprise, publicity, the ingenious use of technology, safety, and harmlessness. The use of manual control allowed the prank to be timed so as not to disrupt the game (it was set off between plays, so the outcome of the game would not be unduly affected). The perpetrators had even thoughtfully attached a note to the balloon explaining that the device was not dangerous and contained no explosives.”

“Harvard president Derek Bok commented: “They have an awful lot of clever people down there at MIT, and they did it again.” President Paul E. Gray of MIT said: “There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that I had anything to do with it, but I wish there were.”

From all this, the original definition of a hack is something that is clever, fun, harmless and a showcase of great talent.

Who is a Hacker?

The Hacker culture dates way back to the 1970s. The first documentation of the Hacker culture, was written by Raphael Finkel at Stanford in 1975, and was later updated by the Stanford AI Labs (SAIL), up to the 1980’s.

Post this, the document remained unmaintained till the late 90s, till Eric S Reynolds picked it up. As a supporting document, he wrote a piece that describes how to become a hacker. In the document, he defines a hacker in the following way -

“There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the first time-sharing minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet experiments. The members of this culture originated the term ‘hacker’. Hackers built the Internet. Hackers made the Unix operating system what it is today. Hackers make the World Wide Web work. If you are part of this culture, if you have contributed to it and other people in it know who you are and call you a hacker, you're a hacker.”

In fact, he further goes on to say that the hacker mindset is something that is independent of the field - “you can find the hacker mindset in the highest form of any science or art.”

How are they different from today’s perception of hackers?

The guide also covers the existence of the misconception of the word Hacker and makes a clear distinction with them. They’re called crackers and Reynolds has a very funny description for them -“There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but aren't. These are people (mainly adolescent males) who get a kick out of breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers call these people ‘crackers’ and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers mostly think crackers are lazy, irresponsible, and not very bright, and object that being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker any more than being able to hot-wire cars makes you an automotive engineer. Unfortunately, many journalists and writers have been fooled into using the word ‘hacker’ to describe crackers; this irritates real hackers no end.”

He even puts out a stern warning to anyone who wants to be a cracker - “If you want to be a cracker, go read the alt.2600 newsgroup and get ready to do five to ten in the slammer after finding out you aren't as smart as you think you are. And that's all I'm going to say about crackers.”

The hacker attitude

To further elucidate the difference between crackers and hackers, Reynolds describes 5 Hacker attitudes. They are -

1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.
2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.
3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.
4. Freedom is good.
5. Attitude is no substitute for competence.

To be a real hacker, one must adhere to these principles along with strong beliefs about freedom and voluntary mutual help.

So, hacker? Or cracker?

The word Hacker has a lot of legacy behind it and it’s incorrect use in today’s world is nothing short of an insult to it. From all of the above characteristics that describe the hacker way, one thing becomes very clear - Hackers build things, while crackers break them.Many companies, most notably Facebook, has used the word hacker in its right meaning. Their fabled hacker way is now almost a blueprint for startups from all over the world. Some journalists are also using them in the way it is meant to be used.However, changing a perception is one of the toughest thing to do. The next time you see or hear a person use the word hack or hacker in an incorrect way, correct them immediately and educate them.

It is said that "A man is defined by the work he does". If we are to go by this saying, then Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, ex President of India, has left us with a lot of remember him by.

Even at the age of 83, Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam involved himself in some of the most important ballistics work in the country. The most note-worthy being his contributions to cardiac technology-a stent that made heart surgeries affordable. And this is not even considering the amount of time that he had spent in sharing his knowledge with the world and philanthropic work he had done.

Here’s a chronicle of the great man’s illustrious life, through his work -



What struck me when this image was made out, is that after his first tenures in ADE and DRDO, his major contributions came through the mantle of being a leader. And while his accolade for being India’s missile man is fully justified, we often forget that he was probably India’s best engineering manager.



An astute engineer

"An engineering manager is someone who is entrusted with the job of synergising and aligning a team’s energies and talents to one common goal."

One must not only have a strong engineering foundation and subject expertise in the field of the project , but must also be a leader to be a good Engineering Manager.

In his early days, he was in a team that designed a light weight helicopter for the army. Apart from this, he also worked directly under Vikram Sarabhai, the founder of the Indian Space Research Organization, under whom he was a project director of the Rohini satellite program. While putting his engineering abilities to good use, he was also learning leadership from some of the best leaders in the world. In his own words, Kalam said,

“I learnt leadership from three great teachers—Dr. Vikram Sarabhai , Prof Satish Dhawan and Dr. Brahm Prakash. This was the time of learning and acquisition of knowledge for me.”

A business statesman

Post his tenure as a scientist, Dr. Kalam started to take up more leadership and management roles. Since Rohini, some of Dr. Kalam’s greatest contributions have come through his leadership roles in PSLV and SLV III. From here on, he led the design and development of India’s most potent missiles - Agni and Prithvi. Cumulatively, Kalam would have easily managed billions of dollars and thousands talented scientists and engineers.

A lot of any managerial job involves mentorship, and Kalam possibility embodies the quintessential mentor. Even his last moments were spent, trying to impart his knowledge with students, whom he loved spending time with. In fact, post his tenure of Chief Scientific Advisor to the Prime Minister, he set himself a target of interacting with at least 100,000 students, so he could share his knowledge and inspire more young people to take up science and technology. Surely a lot of this would have rubbed off on his subordinates too.

A leader

In my opinion, every leader is different. In Dr. Kalam’s case, he was a rare blend of brilliance, determination, foresight and humility. To start with, he was a brilliant scientist, who earned his stripes with some of the brightest minds in the world. That is the foremost requirement for an engineering manager. This earns an intellectual’s respect.

Secondly, a leader is not worried about rolling up his sleeves and getting work done. Kalam was as hard working as anyone else, and there are many employee accounts of his tremendous work ethic.

Examples of foresight are abundant in his book India 2020, where he very clearly describes what India needs to do to become a world superpower -

“I have identified five areas where India has a core competence for integrated action: (1) agriculture and food processing; (2) education and healthcare; (3) information and communication technology; (4) infrastructure, reliable and quality electric power, surface transport and infrastructure for all parts of the country; and (5) self-reliance in critical technologies. These five areas are closely inter-related and if advanced in a coordinated way, will lead to food, economic and national security.”

The ultimate engineering manager

All the professional characteristics that Dr. Kalam possessed are all the necessary ingredients for an astute engineering manager. However it was Kalam’s demeanor which really set him apart. In a world where the powerful is often come across as arrogant and brash, here was a man, with unsurmountable achievements in his kitty, who was as humble and down to earth as anyone could be.

It seeped through in his style of leadership. Popular journalist Rajdeep Sardesai recounts an interesting experience with him -

“In 2007, at the Ramnath Goenka journalism awards, I had the privilege of receiving the award from President Kalam. When a question and answer session followed the award ceremony, Kalam refused to sit in the front row. Instead, he came and sat cross-legged on the stage, asking us why we didn't focus more on science and technology in the news. It was a bizarre scene: pompous editors sitting on chairs while the easy-going president was on the stage floor asking us questions! This was quintessential Kalam: unconventional in style, be it his floppy silvery mane of hair, or inviting an audience to send him questions to his personal email: ‘please write to abdulkalam@apj.com, shall I repeat!’”

The engineering manager is the custodians of the engineering culture in any organization, and with the engineering fraternity needs a Kalam Blueprint for engineering managers.