Geekery

Geek God – Dries Buytaert

Posted on 02. Mar, 2010 by Jake.

NOTE: We will be changing the Geek God section to feature local geek icons. For now, unfortunately, the post I wrote with details on this has been lost in the ether during our migration of Geekery to a new server. We will be reposting that one soon, but for now, here’s one last look at an international Geek God before we shift our focus to leading local geeks.

You can keep your rock stars and your famous sportsmen and your literary icons. While normal people are busy worshiping these characters, true geeks, particularly programmers and developers, have different heroes. A developer who has written an impressive and game changing system, platform or app will be spoken about in hushed tones and hailed as a hero. And no developer is held up on a higher platform than open source programmer Dries Buytaert, who is the original creator of the Drupal CMS.

For those not up to speed with Drupal, it is a great open source CMS. It can be used to create anything from small personal blogs to important and powerful corporate and government websites. While WordPress is the blogging CMS for the common blogger, Drupal is the developer’s choice. It has also been described as “the Linux of the internet”, and if Drupal is Linux than Word Press would be equivalent to Windows. It also boasts an extremely active and engaged community, which sets it apart from other, similar platforms.

Buytaert is from Belgium, and his claims to fame other than creating Drupal include founding Acquia, which seeks to be to Drupal what Red Hat is to Linux, and launching Mollom, a state-of-the-art spam-busting service. “Mollom’s purpose is to dramatically reduce the effort of keeping your site clean and the quality of your content high. Currently, Mollom is a spam-killing one-two punch combination of a state-of-the-art spam filter and CAPTCHA server.” Over 4,000 websites are protected by the Mollom service. More than 100,000 messages are being analyzed every day.”

He has a PHD in Computer Science and Engineering from Belgium’s University of Ghent and has won numerous awards, including being voted one of the Top 5 most influential people in open source by MindTouch in 2009. His allegiance to open source has gotten him called “the anti-Bill Gates”, but he himself rejected the tag, blogging that he isn’t comfortable with being branded anti-Microsoft.

For one of the most highly rated programmers in the World, he is surprisingly humble, and has a sense of humour. His website’s somewhat self-depricating bio admits that “sometimes people laugh at his hair, but he is cool with that”. The man is a true geek icon.

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Geek God – Mark Shuttleworth

Posted on 20. Oct, 2009 by Jake.

Thanks to the Ubuntu declarations a few weeks back, this week I decided to go local and find you a homegrown example of a Geek God. It is perhaps a tad ironic that the most famous South African geek who springs to mind, Mark Shuttleworth, is actually based in London now, but I suppose, like Charlize Theron or Dave Matthews, we need to claim him as one of us, no matter how many years he spends out of the country. As a massively successful uber-geek he is an inspiration to South African geeks and, having made the transition from developer to filthy rich entrepreneur, he reminds us that there is no reason for us not to think big.

The man could not be described as an underachiever. He set up his first business, which specialised in Internet Security, in 1995, and had sold it for 3.5 billion by 1999. He has since helmed two similarly successful businesses, not to mention becoming the first African in Space, where he got to chat to Nelson Mandela via radio. And, believe it or not, he was born in Welkom. He has undoubtedly come a long way.

While he is now best known more for making a ton of money and visiting space, Shuttleworth’s geek credentials are formidable. As a student at UCT, in the early nineties, he was involved in setting up the varsity’s first residential internet connection at his res, Jan Smuts house. Proving he has skills over and above his obviously strong business sense, he was one of the developers of the Debian operating system. And, from 2001, he has championed the Open Source revolution, first through the Shuttleworth Foundation and then, in 2005, as the founder of the now internationally famous Ubuntu.

He seems like a good guy, too. His mission into space wasn’t a selfish one, and his time spent at The International Space Station included his participation in experiments relating to AIDS and stem-cell research. While he was in space, he found time to chat to Michelle Foster, a terminally ill 14 year old Cancer patient who has since passed away (she asked him to marry her, and he responded by politely changing the subject). And, proving he has a sense of humour, his title at Ubuntu, rather than CEO or director, is Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life.

Coming from Southern Africa, where the dictator who gets the most mentions in the news is far from benevolent, we need all the good PR we can get. So Shuttleworth is ours, even if he does insist on setting up camp in the land of grey weather and fish and chips.

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