My self-hosted Wordpress site was hacked twice in less than 3 months as reported here and here. I don’t update this site enough to deal with that and so I’ve switched to Octopress which is a ruby-based hacker-friendly static site generator based on Jekyll. At first this seemed like a step backwards, but I just don’t need a database-driven CMS that requires frequent security patches.

I gave a presentation a couple of weeks ago to the Math & Computer Science Society at my alma mater, Drexel University. The title was called ”Business 101 For Hackers” with the sub-title of ”Dare To Be Under-Employed”. Most people are taught to go to school and then get a job, and this talk aims to help give you confidence to create a job for yourself instead. It’s particularly geared towards Computer Science students and encouraging them to become independent developers. The slides have been uploaded to slideshare with audio (i.e. slidecast), or you can just download the mp3. I’m going to continue working on this presentation, and encourage people to please give me feedback.

This was an email response to the USPTO seeking guidance on software patents. Here is related excerpt from the Free Software Foundation on the situation:

Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Bilski v. Kappos, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) plans to release new guidance as to which patent applications will be accepted, and which will not. As part of this process, they are seeking input from the public about how that guidance should be structured.

Here is my message:

The difficulty in recruiting hackers or seasoned technologists is often lamented in the tech startup community (e.g. Philly Startup Leaders), despite having both large and diverse developer communities. I am constantly asked by entrepreneurs who/what/where/how to find hackers or tech co-founders. They are a scarce resource, so here is a description of an idea for a developer community that functions as a company:

Hacker Community == Hacker Company