The cathedral model of software engineering is large, grand, and corporate. It is having a large pool of developers build what a select few people have designed already. It is rigid and structured, which causes it to be very slow. The bazaar model, on the other hand, is fast paced, where many teams of people are designing and implementing different portions of a project all at once. There is no complete overarching plan governing what features get implemented when. I say that the cathedral model is corporate because to some extent, companies releasing products have to have a plan and release dates and concrete goals, because that’s just how most companies operate. This is what many companies stick to it because that’s how most physical products are designed and manufactured. This was certainly the case with a company I worked with called Zebra. Zebra manufactures printers, scanners, and mobile computers (which are literally just smartphones without the ability to make calls, I don’
Steven Levy writes that a hack is a “clever connection…imbued with innovation, style, and technical virtuosity”. “Hackers” were the people that sought out these new connections. The hackers at MIT were the people that wanted to understand how the machines worked, and then improve them or make them do something new. Purely out of necessity, hackers began by hanging around the computer labs at night and in the wee hours of the morning. This habit began the hacker trend of not caring about what time the rest of the world thought it was. A reoccurring theme was that of seeing a problem or inconvenience and fixing or lessening it for the benefit of all. An early example of this was Dennis and Stockman’s FLIT debugger, which was at its core a better version of what the machine came with. Another pattern amongst the hackers was creating things just for the sake of creating them, to test the boundaries of what was possible. Samson explored the audio capabilities of the TX