[deamanto]

You just brought a random memory from uni where a small group of people wanted to get others interested in cybersecurity and did a weekly session on teaching others.. First meeting had a huge turnout and I expected future meetings to consist of learning through teaching us concepts with some practical tasks, except it became a session of just a few people talking to each other using security terminology that no one understood because it was meant to be introductory.

[jamal-kumar]

I think the big thing is that pedagogy itself is a hugely broad subject and especially skill that you might just dunning-kruger yourself hard on thinking you're good at. I always thought school would have been a lot more engaging if the teachers were actually paid enough to give a damn, they have a tremendously undervalued skill set and we put our kids in the trust of them while cutting their salaries every other year or so? What the hell is the motivation at that point?

I really cut my teeth on programming getting yelled at a lot by a guy in German about meeting OpenBSD kodequalität and that kind of sucked, to be honest I was at a point one time after enough workplace toxicity in IT (Getting sexually harassed by a boss at a megacorp guaranteed I don't ever want to work at one of those places again especially) where I figured I'd rather be a bee farmer or something instead. There's really no necessity for that kind of attitude but some people have been going around acting like this is the way things are in IT so you better suck it up and get used to it, especially when there's a lot of money on the line, and it's definitely true that a LOT of people could learn better on how to write code that doesn't get hacked or crashes, because often there isn't just tons of money on the line but people's health, safety, and wellness - but if the health, safety and wellness of the person writing the code is affected by some insanely stupid cultural assumption that's existed in this industry, then how good are they ultimately going to be at it in their code? It was kind of funny watching Linus Torvalds explode at people for these things back in the day, but in hindsight I'm very glad he took some time off to become a more emotionally and socially mature person for the good of the project. I don't want to work in an industry where it's just smelly angry brogrammers with maturity issues, the more that changes the better and I think I see it happening quite rapidly.

What these kids are doing is a huge step in the right direction, I applaud them. They seem to get what the past half century or so of people seem to have been kind of embarrassingly bad at and that's just being decent human beings with each other.

[zozbot234]

> It was kind of funny watching Linus Torvalds explode at people for these things back in the day, but in hindsight I'm very glad he took some time off to become a more emotionally and socially mature person for the good of the project.

It's ironic that you say this while complaining about bad attitudes in the OpenBSD community. When it comes to obnoxious attitudes, Linus Torvalds is a nobody compared to Theo de Raadt. BTW, Linus is now pushing for gradual adoption of Rust in the kernel, which would turn many issues of "writing code that doesn't crash" (though not all) into things that a compiler can check for you. That community is generally pretty relaxed and cooperative towards newcomers, due to a shared understanding that there's no point getting angry about code that won't even pass that check.