On the Shoulders of Giants

Someone wrote the library, framework, tool, language that we mostly depend on. For free, because they needed it too.

We are, to some degree, beneficiaries of labor we did not commission and cannot fully account for (a.k.a spoiled brats?). It probably explains the discourse around ^[1], why they read as a different class of practitioner entirely.

Those people operated without abstraction layers. No package for that. No LLMs to consult. They had to reason from first principles, all the way down, until the problem yielded.

Every abstraction is a crystallized solution to someone else’s constraints.

Most of them built it in obscurity. Thousands of others whose names I know or will never know. The open source ecosystem runs on that: undocumented cognitive labor, contributed without compensation, at scale.

None of this is possible without standing on the shoulders of giants ^[2]. Linus Torvalds, Dennis, Evan You, Tanner Linsley (Midas Touch), and many others! What a time to be alive.

P.S. When I think of Linus Torvalds writing Linux, I always imagine him sitting in his room with a loud clacky keyboard and a CRT monitor. That image lives rent free in my head every time XD