“On persistence”

“I didn’t expect you get this done; you don’t know how to program after all.”

After I had compiled and exported my school’s student magazine from a collection of Latex files to a printable PDF.

“It’s just markup.”

After I had made my first web site and figured out how to scp it onto a friend’s web space at university. (The engineering students got all the cool stuff in the mid-90s.)

“Installing SuSE Linux from a box isn’t anything special really, Gentoo is the real deal.”

After countless hours of fighting with Yast and a plethora of configuration files when I finally had KDE 2 running.

“You should definitely know how to program in C to really understand a Linux system.”

From the foreword of a book that I saved up for to learn more about Linux system administration.

“Yeah, cool, you compiled that application yourself. But have you ever patched your kernel?”

After an endless fall down the rabbit hole of chasing down obscure libraries, one compiler error at a time.

“Ruby? That’s just scripting.”