[petermurrayrust]

Greetings to HN! I am very proud to have been featured in HN at least twice.

I take inspiration from a quote last year from Nellie Kroes - European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda. She's an iconic fighter for Openness - goes on Spanish hack camps with 14-year olds. Hopefully accurate:

"I'm 71. I don't do this because I have to but because I want to". [PMR was also 71 at that stage].

I take "hack" as a very positive concept - from its roots in MIT and the Hacker Manifesto up to HN and "hackdays" and "hackathons".

I started my communal chemistry code ca 30 years ago - in FORTRAN - and it's gone through C++ (including f2c), and now Java. There have been six major revisions of JUMBO.

I had the major epiphany about 15 years ago when I was writing molecular display in Java3D (argh!). I realised I didn't have to do this all myself - and so integrated the magnificent Jmol into the system. That led to the culture or sharing the load and fighting the battles communally (standard chemistry software is awful, highly prices and restrictive - one company will sue you if the publish the output FORTRAN log file).

I shan't give my life history , but I have been incredibly fortunately to find like-minded collaborators both locally and globally. Locally it came from Jim Downing who just us about 9 years ago and showed us how to use all the right ideas and tools (JUnit, maven, Jenkins (CI), Bitbucket, Stackoverflow, agile (stand ups, dojos, etc.).

The great thing was that we shared the load. We met at the Panton Arms every Friday lunch and would often work there in the afternoon. Yes, work - where ideas would flow freely. The core of hacking is not writing the code but working out what needs to be written.

We are committed to excellent software, not competitive academic impact-factor points. That meant we could do things properly. FWIW our work has gone into Cambridge Chemistry's submission for the evaluation process.

We're proud that many of our tools (OSCAR, OPSIN, ChemicalTagger, JUMBO) are robust and distributed without major maintenance need. This is unique in chemistry. As a result I catalysed a unique - zero-cash community - the Blue Obelisk (http://blueoblisk.org and Wikipedia). 20+ F/LOSS groups work in unplanned parallel ways and have created some of the best chemical software.

We are now moving into a major effort to extract all scientific facts from the current literature (contentmine.org just released). The major challenge will be lawyers. If any Hackers want to take part in knowledge liberation we'd love to hear from you.

[peterwwillis]

> The core of hacking is not writing the code but working out what needs to be written.

It's really difficult for me to get certain of my co-workers to work out what needs to be written. Mostly it seems we discuss minutia and get off on tangents rather than work out the whole thing; it's difficult to get them to look at it from anything but a low level (arguments about how an API should work takes an hour). Do you have any advice on how to get people to discuss the work in a realistic, high level way?

[petermurrayrust]

Culture is difficult to build - either from scratch or from an established base. I have practised mutual respect - a meritocracy. Although formally I was a "group leader" or "supervisor" I regarded my colleagues - whether students of research assistants as my peers.

I was prepared to be told when I was "wrong" and think about it. Gradually we built a culture where the culture - as well as the people - determined what we did and how we worked. My group reorganised how we ran weekly meetings and I followed their practice. (Of course things like lab safety and secure practice have to be taken ultra-seriously as do basic human relations - gender, race, etc.).

I am very proud of the people who went through "my" / our group. They all went into hi-tech IT - companies, scientific organisations and none into formal academia. Most are in the UK and therefore directly contributing to our wealth and my pension.

The Friday pub sessions are really valuable. Nothing as formal as an "away day". It helped that many of us played cricket (I gave up two years ago - made it to 70), and I introduced them to the Guardian crossword.

It depends very much on the goal of your group. If you have a chance to develop new ways of doing things, do so. If there is no slack in the system then the daily work is likely to turn out competent but no inspiring code.

If you can do one thing go on a Software Carpentry course (you might be able to count it as training). If not, can you run a dojo? If your organisation provides training you may be able to bring in someone (or travel) to provide the experience. fresh views help.

Ultimately you have to aim for respect, and flexibility. I don't make major mistakes or have failures - I have experiments which don't work out at the time. JUMBO has been through 6 revisions over 20 years. I'm very lucky - I have that luxury to keep going at something which isn't critical for my income. When I was earning an income through consultancy/training I had to make sure that I had some slack in which to learn.

Avoid individualism but try to give everyone space in which to make their own identifiable contribution. I would normally start projects, then suggest that group members worked =on them, and when the left, they retained the "guru-ship" of the project.

[X4]

Impressive! I always have the fear that when I get older, that I'll not be able to follow up with all the new stuff that's appearing. I believe that many do so. Especially sites like HN/Reddit are introducing a lot of new technology and information, which maybe harder to follow with age.

How do you manage to stay ahead of your time?

[petermurrayrust]

I have always looked ahead - used to read a lot of near-future sci-fi - Arthur Clarke, Asimov, Gibson, Stephenson, Bradbury. Much of what they envisaged is reality - earphones, networks, knowledge-based AI.

It use to be hard to do computing - you had to understand compilers and assembler and you were often on your own. Now I'd say that anyone who can do Sudoku can understand many common algorithms. Here's a simple example (https://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2014/03/15/segmentation-of-im... Ramer-Douglas-Peucker segmentation of contours). I've illustrated it with kangaroos - but I think children of (I guess) six years old could easily manage it. And so could a 75-year old.

The thing that's different is the frameworks. 10 years ago you'd have to build this from the bottom up. Things like reading images (Java.IOImage is not cuddly). But now we have boofcv.org and Apache (and similar in Python).

Learn to use libraries and you can be an effective programmer. The skill is finding out what's out there. And here the social skills are important. Go to hack days - we had a wonderful NHS hack day in Cambridge. Find your makerspaces. Contact Mozilla, Wikipedia or OKFN. They'll all love to hear from you.

Do you like crosswords? You've got half the skills required for natural Language Programming already. And remember there are people to help you. I will.

And thats' a great idea - an over-70s hack day. If you are interested, tweet me @petermurrayrust Not on twitter? That's the first thing you should think about!

[lifeisstillgood]

This thread is marvellous - inspiring for those of is heading through middle age and those of any age wondering should we compromise quality yet again.

Thank you - and good luck.

PS was the NHS hack day an OPen Knowledge thing - I hear they are kicking off a NHS England wide data project?

[petermurrayrust]

From nhshackday.com:

Geeks who love the NHS

NHS Hack Days are weekend events that brings together doctors, nurses, developers, designers, and other "geeks who love the NHS" to create disruptive solutions to problems in the health space. NHS Hack Days are ongoing and enjoy the support of prominent international health care and technology leaders.

The next NHS Hack Day will be at St.George's Students' Union, 2nd Floor Hunter Wing St George's, University of London, Cranmer Terrace, Tooting SW17 0RE London on the 24th-25th of May

=====

IIRC there is no charge but there may well be limited. You don't have to be a developer. Could be useful if you know how to find (public) NHS data.

[X4]

😢 That's awesome and encouraging ! Thanks for the thoroughly written response and the great tips!