A hacker’s story on dedication, with happy ending :

It’s midnight. I’ve been working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. I’m not being paid. In fact, my project was canceled six months ago, so I’m evading security, sneaking into Apple Computer’s main offices in the heart of Silicon Valley, doing clandestine volunteer work for an eight-billion-dollar corporation.

Apparently, this graphing calculator quite successfully introduced kids & people to math, who wouldn’t otherwise.
Awesome. These are the kind of people I become jealous to.

Some excellent quotes:

“the first 90 percent of the work is easy, the second 90 percent wears you down, and the last 90 percent – the attention to detail – makes a good product.”

“The secret to programming is not intelligence, though of course that helps. It is not hard work or experience, though they help, too. The secret to programming is having smart friends.”

“Sitting behind a one-way mirror, watching first-time users struggle with our software, reminded me that programmers are the least qualified people to design software for novices.”

“It shipped on more than twenty million machines. It never officially existed.”

Too bad he failed on getting it into Microsoft Windows though. 🙂

This where another fun started to begin – ripped straight from Kevin Mitnick’s book, someone pretended to be a troll, by pretending to know the security in Microsoft campus. A Microsoft employee took the bait 😀 but a kind soul let him know of his mistake (fun spoilers!!) 😀

Oh man… easily the best laugh I’ve had in weeks, that one.