of invention, surviving on the sweet contagion of creative energy. Employment bonuses mean nothing here fancy packaging and market share are viewed with contempt if a product lacks art. Beauty, now that’s the thing—the beauty of elegant code, of a robust network, of a balanced design that “just works” without duct tape and feature bloat. It is from this culture that the Internet emerged, as well as the Open Source movement. Less obviously, it’s also a diverse community of home-shop machinists, Arduino artists, guerilla solar experimenters, human-powered vehicle designers, robotics hobbyists, amateur radio satellite builders, and countless other independent developers. If you want to see passionate invention without the sloppy overhead of a big R&D budget or the weird constraints of maximizing shareholder value, go find a hacker... someone who gets a thrill from circumventing limitations and who knows how to get things done. This has been my world for 30 years—a world where fun is the bottom line and livings are made on the opportunistic spinoffs of creativity, not by selling one’s life for a salary. We subsist in the dark matter between industries, trolling flea markets and dumpsters for Obtainium, mail-ordering goodies, making holy pilgrimages to the surplus Mecca of Silicon Valley, repurposing the detritus of corporate America to our own obsessive ends. Scattered among us are conjurers, alchemists, wizards, lone-wolf inventors, quirky entrepreneurs, larger-than-life writers, and the origins of more than a few disturbing geek stereotypes. In this parallel universe, the motivation for creating is highly personal. In industry, you can bet that any massive development effort is associated with a business plan—there’s no room for slack in a bottom-line world, and seldom are things done for fun. But here, you’ll find entire lifetimes given over to chasing quixotic dreams you’ll see personal fortunes whittled down to marginal subsistence in the name of invention and reputation. Occasionally there’s an imagined pot o’ gold, to be sure, but most likely it’s just a reassuring fiction to keep the spousal unit calm in the face of demonic focus, Every Goddamn Night Out There in the Shed. No, our motives are usually as guileless as passion itself: chasing daydreams, building tools, realizing obsessions, shattering limits, publishing, earning grins of appreciation from the cognoscenti and accolades from neophytes. These are things that touch the soul more than the bank account, and there’s definitely a conceit about it—our sense of security lies more in our toolsets than our 401Ks. We feel sorry for vested employees with their BMWs and well-appointed houses, even as we decorate our labs with rusted hand-me-down office furniture and pay for system upgrades by mining our hardware boneyards through eBay. But money is not the point. It’s the exhilaration of surfing the knee of the learning curve, the almost erotic bliss of a machine flickering to life—catching the spark and glowing while the rest of the world sleeps. Of course, getting to that point can involve a ludicrous amount of work. The First Steps This is an almost embarrassingly intimate look at how crazy unbalanced people can take an ambitious dream and pull together the resources to make it come true (and then go out and play). You’ll never get a corporate middle manager to admit it, but such lunacy, driven by emotion and other unquantifiable wild PragPub January 2013 29