I have watched a few hacks happening, and I was lucky – hacking is not a spectator sport.
From what I am told, great hacks invariably have sentences like one of the following somewhere in the beginning of the timeline:
“Hmm, that looks interesting. I wonder if…”
“I am telling you, it can’t be done”
“What do you mean, it doesn’t work?”
“No Linux driver, eh? Let’s have a look…”
“Anyone have a screwdriver, I need to look at that chipset”
“I wonder how this works…”
“WTF?”
I know that some companies actually use terms like “hacking” to motivate employees into fixing up someone else’s code. In fact, I intensely dislike the very idea of “hackfests” because they imply all the wrong things.
Sit back – this is a long rant: