The black T-shirt crowd

My previous post quotes Greg Jorgensen’s imaginary interview with Linus Torvalds. In the interview, Torvalds says “the black T-shirt crowd” has gotten bored with Linux because it has become too easy. Now Git gives them a new arcane product to explore and master. Jorgensen has Torvalds say

I didn’t really expect anyone to use [Git] because it’s so hard to use, but that turns out to be its big appeal. No technology can ever be too arcane or complicated for the black t-shirt crowd.

John Durden pointed out in the comments that I’m wearing a black T-shirt in the photo on my blog. Touché!

The T-shirt I was wearing at the time of the photo isn’t entirely black, though the portion showing in my mugshot is. Here’s the full photo:

I’ll admit to wearing a metaphorical black T-shirt, i.e. enjoying solving arcane problems, though not the particular problems mentioned in Jorgensen’s satire. I take no pleasure in troubleshooting operating system or version control problems, for example. I want such things to just work. But I do enjoy solving some kinds of problems that most people would rather not think about. It would be the pot calling the kettle black for me to poke too much fun at the programmers in Jorgensen’s article. Anyone with a PhD in partial differential equations should be cautious about calling someone else geeky.

(There should be a joke in there about black kettles and black T-shirts, but it’s late as I write this and I can’t pull it off.)

5 thoughts on “The black T-shirt crowd

  1. “(There should be a joke in there about black kettles and black T-shirts, but it’s late as I write this and I can’t pull it off.)”

    Maybe you should have ordered one size larger.
    :-)

  2. Being more of a hardware guy, I guess I am a black pot rather than a kettle. But I understand the lure of a hard problem. Can I claim a piece of dark clothing? Black pants? Really dark blue socks?

  3. I’ve recently begun slogging through Project Euler. It’s a great opportunity to revel in my geekdom.

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