4 Core Competencies of Great Hackers

Posted by: Daniel Haran on 2009-03-10

At giraffesoft we do a lot of pair-programming collaborative development, both internally and when hired to coach or audit teams. After working closely with dozens of programmers, it's time to draw some conclusions.

Here are 4 traits that appear to be universal amongst great hackers:

Typing over 60 wpm

Thousands of hours spent on IM and IRC make you a faster typist. It's a skill that can be learned in school or with specialized software in 20 to 40 hours. So why are so many programmers glancing at their keyboards for common symbols?

Bringing up typing speed in conversation meets some resistance amongst some programmers. I've tried arguing that the micro-interruptions to your programming can knock you out of your flow and kill your productivity. For those that do not listen, I offer the example of people that google hotmail. It seems noobish, doesn't it?

Owning the command-line

Some developers need a pretty GUI or IDE to wrap every command-line utility. During one audit at a consulting company I saw a programmer wrestle with his IDE for 10 minutes in front of two CTOs. Verdict? His IDE didn't yet have support for the last version of Ruby on Rails, which we needed for specific functionality (ActiveResource). He was stuck.

In contrast, every great hacker we know has a customized environment, and they routinely compose unix commands. Even those stuck on Windows because of corporate policy still run Linux at home or on their servers.

Knowing your editor

Let's not pick editor fights: the only 3 editors we know to be used by great hackers are TextMate, vim and emacs. The most productive hackers will often customize their editor heavily.

We haven't met a single great hacker that relied on an IDE, although we hear they exist.

Reading code: owning your tools

We've noticed more people ignoring documentation and going straight to the source code. It's a great start.

Diving into a large code base to quickly understand what it does is a skill that can be practiced. People do get much faster at it with a little bit of practice. So fast that using a debugger to step through code seems slow by comparison; I've been chided by one hacker for using a debugger. "It's slow and it doesn't help you understand the code." Ouch.

Most hackers we know routinely read the source of plugins and frameworks before using them. By choosing better architected tools it's easier to add new functionality or discover security flaws. They also appear rather nonchalant about modifying framework code. They understand what it does, and feel free to modify it as if it was their code.

But, but...

The list isn't final or perfect, just the result of observations and discussions. A check-list for self-improvement.

I don't pretend to fit the description of "great hacker" that I've offered up: I don't read enough code, haven't done much work customizing my editor and barely know some CLI utilities like awk or sed. While I won't claim that learning these 4 skills will make you a great hacker, it seems unlikely you can become one without them.