Almost Famous

They say (these mysterious "they") that thousands of blogs are being created each day. Imagine that! Skipping all the splogs (you know, nasty spam blogs! Stealing my precious, precious thoughts), there are millions of blogs out there. You would think, with so many people rambling about this and that, no one would actually pay attention.

Certainly not Aaron Swartz!

So I must say, Aaron's name resides at the periphery of my mind, that I probably had seen him before I had known about him. I had bought Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks because I had thought it would be about the Fog Creek interns, and perhaps about the Fog Creek Software Development Methodology, the secret sauce that makes Copilot run.

And then, there was this peculiar detour. It was Paul Graham land, and we were introduced to another group of lads, this time building one of those social networking websites of sort, something called reddit.

But you know, where was the money in that? I mean, c'mon, Copilot is where the money is! Joel Spolsky! Genius!

And amongst the Y Combinator awardees (you have to admit, Y Combinator has got to be the most seriously geeky company name you could think of) was Aaron Swartz. Now, put in a lineup, and I wouldn't be able to tell him from anyone else. I mean, I might be able to distinguish him from, say, Yaron Guez fella ("owned!") through a process of elimination even though their names kinda sound the same, right? Aaron. Yaron.

Who would have thought that I'd be sitting and reading reddit on a daily basis. No RSS feeds for me, no thank you. I'll let the wisdom of crowds direct my choices, plus a one line summary that is the "extreme" version of the elevator pitch. You've got one line to get my interest ("Best line evah!") before I decide whether to click on the link.

But getting the attention of Aaron's like getting the attention of Oprah, right? I mean, surely he's not looking up every reference to him on the Internet. I mean, he's an important guy. Web pages to work on. Pet projects. Chessboxing.

Oh, but look, he commented on my blog. Mine! And that makes me famous. That's right. Me. I'll never clean this blog again. Say, Aaron, did you know your boy, Paul Graham used to hang out with Robert Morris? Yes, that Robert Morris. He, of the Internet work of, when was it, 1988? Robert was a grad student at Cornell, the son of a security expert, and liked hacking around, so he wrote a worm, and lo and behold, it got out of control.

The computer science department at Cornell kicked him out. This was one of those cyber crimes that people had no idea how to handle. So Robert had to do some community service. I believe he had to teach some programming. Solid punishment that. But it's OK, he probably taught them COBOL and said, people, you'll thank me in 12 years (12 + 1988).

But I figure writing a blog entry like this is only going to work a few times, and yet I lack a really funny joke to end this ("what do you know, a talking muffin!").

So I end with a challenge. Write that next piece of wunderbar software, the one that changes people's lives, the one that makes people say, "What will Aaron think of next?" or "I see your Swartz is as big as mine. Now let's see how well you handle it."

And truly great things will happen.

It is your destiny.