[ferguess_k]

Being a grown up man with a family and a kid, I gradually care less and less about my economical "social identity". It is not exciting at all. I bring bread to the table for the family. I am among the backbone of the society i.e. people who pays the largest amount of tax proportional to their income, while receiving very little benefit from the government.

Why do I even want this identity? I have to wear this hat simply because we living in a modern feudal world.

Now come back to the "social identity" defined in the article -- "computer programmers". I do care about this identity, but as all identities, like tags, you gotta beautify it a bit -- you have to attach some meaning to it. Without the personal meaning, you handle the power of definition to other people, who naturally don't care about you.

The tag I created for myself is "Kernel Programmer", initials in capital letters. My motto is "There are programmers, and there are system programmers, and ultimately there are kernel programmers" and I want to put it on my table in print. Don't get me wrong though, my work has nothing to do with kernel programming. It is not system programming either. It is even more abstract (and boring) than your usual FE/BE programming. But I do kernel programming as a hobby, and as a hobby I'm my own master and I'm willing to apply the most stringent standard to myself, which I'll never do the same to my work BTW.

And who can say that I'm not a kernel programmer even when it is just the XV6 kernel? Who can say that I'm not serious about kernel programming when I'm ready to write as many tests as I can imagine for a very early Linux kernel?

Life is meaningless and I have to create meanings out of the void. That's it.

[aleph_minus_one]

> "There are programmers, and there are system programmers, and ultimately there are kernel programmers"

... and "ultimore" there are assembly programmers, machine code programmers, ASIC microcode programmers, ... :-)

[ferguess_k]

Exactly. Pick one that excites you, and paint a picture that you are special in a list. I think that definitely excited me and put a meaning, however small, into my very boring and mundane life. Dogs at least have freedom.

BTW definitely would love to do more professional assembly or microcode, if possible! I'm planning to migrate a very old kernel to different architectures and there is tons of assembly code, or, to be more precisely, more cursed GCC inline assembly code in the kernel. E.g. everything in string.h is in asm.