Working with intellectual property is scary

The other day Goldman Sachs was at my college campus trying to recruit computer programmers. As the recruiters described how wonderful it is to work for Goldman Sachs, I couldn't help but recall an article I read about how Goldman Sachs prosecuted a former employee, Sergey Aleynikov, for stealing intellectual property. I don't know all the details of the case, but essentially, Aleynikov was trying to do what was right and legally required by open source software licenses and contribute code that he created back to the open source community. I would never work for a company like Goldman Sachs, because I believe that open-source is a good thing and ought to be promoted, not discouraged.

You can check out some of these articles for more information about the trial: Vanity Fair, Above the Law, Forbes

So much to read, So little time

Recently, I added Y Combinator's Hacker News to my RSS feed. I quickly learned that there were more interesting articles posted than I could possibly read. My main purpose in subscribing to Hacker News was to become a better programmer, yet I found myself reading articles on how to run a successful startup and how healthy eating is an engineering problem. Later, I decided to just do a Google search for "how to become a better programmer." In the first few hits I found an article with a list of specific suggestions and measurable tasks that I could do. Most of the time, more information (like from Hacker News) just takes our focus away from actually doing anything worthwhile. I could continue reading articles about becoming a better programmer, but until I actually implement the ideas in the articles, I am just wasting my time.