John Miedema

Birth of the Reader-Hacker, Pt 2.

Reading causes writing; it also causes hacking. Hacking refers to the use of digital technology for creative ends. I like the way the term has the connotation of amateur activity and the fresh thinking that goes with it, as well as the connotation of mastery.

1976. I was ten years old and would rather have been reading, but my friend forced me to watch Star Trek. After that, I couldn’t get enough of Star Trek, science fiction, and all things geeky.

A few years later, I couldn’t get enough of Space Invaders, Pacman, Asteroids, and Chopper. The games seemed like the little worlds of Dungeons and Dragons that we were creating on paper. Bought a Timex computer, with 2 KB memory, a tape deck for storage, and a television screen for a monitor.

High school computer lessons. I started out learning how to program Fortran on punch cards. My first program printed a Sword of Shannara banner, the book I was reading at the time.

1987. Bought an Atari computer for word processing undergraduate essays. With a early form of modem, I could read the first online bulletin boards.

1988. The University of Western Ontario Library introduced two computer terminals where students could search journal indexes stored on CD ROMs. I considered them god’s gift to students, who previously had to search paper indexes by hand. Writing papers changed forever.

1991. I bought a Smith Corona, dedicated word processor for $1200. It seemed a reasonable price at the time. With the assistance of the copy shop, I ‘published’ a small book for friends.

1994. Created my first website on Geocities, where I could ‘hang out’ with people with similar reading interests.

1999. Working in health research, I got weary of crunching numbers manually in Microsoft Office. Explored the program’s Visual Basic for Applications functions. It was a great way to start learning programming. You record a macro by using the program as a normal user, then you start tinkering with the program. I started ‘reading’ computer books. Some rare books provided fascinating philosophical angles on concepts such as elegance and aesthetics, e.g. Steve McConnell’s Code Complete. After a year of learning, I wrote the Microsoft certification exam for Visual Basic programming.

2000. Hired as a programmer by an IBM company, LGS. Later LGS was rolled into the IBM administration. Nearly ten years of programming followed, mostly web-based applications. There are many people like me who fall into programming by accident. We would prefer to be reading and writing, but needing to pay the bills, and finding the writing aspect of programming somewhat satisfying, make a career out of it.

2006. I still do not find that programming fits comfortably over my spirit. One day in the library I find myself looking at the library OPAC, and thinking, I could improve this. I look into library school, and find there is a clear intersection with my IT skills and the needs of the modern library. Library school also offers a bit of juice regarding my deeper, personal interests in reading and writing. I enroll.

I am turned on by the idea of the open source OPAC. I start open source programming myself, building software that makes the web better for readers and librarians. My OpenBook plugin helps readers connect web pages to detailed book data in Open Library. My FuzzyCat prototype showed that many library catalogues can be crawled using a few simple design rules.

The modern reader is not extended simply by writing skills, but also by web skills, the ability to hack the web to make it better serve the purposes of reading.