- What Lutus talks about exists even when it's not for anyone else.
I have never been paid to write code, and my formal CS education is limited to AP Computer Science, and a one-credit Java class in college. I wrote 20 years ago a backup script implementing Mike Rubel's insight <http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/> about using `rsync` and hard links to create snapshots backups. It's basically my own version of `rsnapshot`. I have deployed it across several of my machines. Every so often I fix a bug or add a feature. Do I need to do it given `rsnapshot`'s existence? No. Is it fun to work on it? Yes.
(I've over the years restored individual files/directories often enough from the resulting backups to have reasonable confidence in the script's effectiveness, but of course one never knows for certain until the day everything gets zapped.)
- What do you do for work if it's not writing code? I'm always fascinated by the non-paid-professional-programmers who frequent HN.
- I worked in tech investment banking for a decade out of college, and now work for myself.
I majored in history and Spanish at Columbia, which is associated with at least two other people who have had eminent computer-related careers/sidelines while studying the liberal arts: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen> and <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Mendelson>. (Not that I would put myself at their level.)
- I’ve worked somewhere that used Snapback, and that’s also from Mike Rubel’s writings.
https://metacpan.org/dist/Snapback2/view/scripts/snapback2.P...
The 2 is I think because an earlier incarnation was by Art Mulder. There is also a Python implementation by apparently yet another person, which appears to be independently inspired by Mike Rubel’s writings.
https://github.com/diegocortassa/snapback
There are also rsyncbackup, rsyncmachine, https://rsnapshot.org/, https://github.com/jonaslu/rsyncrotatingbackup (inspired by http://www.dbourget.com/software/remote-backup.pl), and several more with seemingly the same original inspiration.
- Paul Lutus recently commented in this thread that linked this (and other) articles of the era: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830191
