Code Breakers of the world

Living and working on unusualness and uncommonness

Diop Papa Makhtar
Bootcamp

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Genetic Code

Code breakers are those who establish new edge cases of genres and cultures. if we use the example of coding, the code breaker would be the one who goes beyond the limit of a system by breaking its underlying code source and making it works according to the new way the code breaker wants the system to behave. But code-breaking is not about doing illegal things but helping people and organizations solve interesting problems better and faster using creative solutions that could be seen only if one is eager to understand the ins and outs of not only the system of interest but any other systems that surround it because ……..

Code-breaking is not about hacking but about system thinking and the design of creative solutions that are efficient, cheap, and easy to operate because, in a world of limited resources, the control of operating costs is a key factor of success not only for organizations but for simple persons like you and me.

Codebreaking is a science in itself, something that could require years of learning in many fields of knowledge that range from the most practical field of engineering to the less but not least practical field of cognitive science because codebreakers almost always need to know how people think in order to build systems that better deserve these people but code-breaking doesn't necessarily require graduating from heavy leagues universities. in fact most code breakers are dropouts who were eager to show that despite their failure in education they can do something that matter for people who care. Bill Gates is a code breaker, and Steve Jobs is also one.

Code-breaking is not necessarily about technical activities or entrepreneurship. it could be about art like music, filmmaking, writing, and editing, or any other kind of activities that has nothing to do with coding and technical infrastructure. There are artists who are code breakers because they played and experienced enough with the edges of genres to create something new that seems like nothing else before but feels like something common to a little or a big set of persons or organizations. The grateful dead and The Beatles are code-breakers. Before inkjet printers and visual art software, Rembrandt was a code breaker producing high-quality visual art with oil painting.

In any field of our society, there are code breakers actually trying to make things better by making better things but they are often shaded by hits and trends with their ideas and works not funded and considered because of unusualness and uncommonness. The Code breaking path is a hard path that is not about short-term outcomes what makes it harder to take as a path because our now connected and industrialized and market capitalized world is more focused on short-term outcomes like quarterly results and earning that drive stock prices whose prices change in a matter of tick that is one-thousandth of a second that is one millisecond. In a such world of high speed of changes world if one wants to see if the work and life of a code breaker matter, one should learn how to better see far into the future. seeing the future is part of the code breaker’s range of skills that’s why code breakers often see how each of their works and life matter and they sometimes connect and work together, making … not many things are as powerful as two or more code-breakers who connect and talk about their craft because these connections push the world forward.

One of the best examples of code breakers connecting and pushing our world forward is this connection of talented people that is this Solvay conference

Solvay conference

meaning that like Erdos, Einstein, Pierre, and Marie Curie, a code breaker could be a mathematician, a physicist, a chemist, a biologist, or any other role that plays with concrete or abstract things and ideas.

Don't think that you can't be like these code breakers! Now that information and knowledge are disseminated all around the world thanks to the personal computer revolution and the internet and a horde of passionate people eager to share for free on sharing platforms like Wikipedia it has never been easier to get the knowledge and information that we want what’s difficult is to filter through the noise of content produced for the sake of selling us things but for that, some code breakers around the world are working on curation algorithms and technologies that will make less noisy for us to learn and understand until we become this code breaker we seek to become.

Muhammad Ali: a personality that transcended his sport

Mohamed Ali is a code breaker who may have broken some bones along his code-breaking way as a side effect, not a goal. Ali is a code breaker because he brought a new way and style of boxing with this mantra that is Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee that leveraged agility like today’s agile tech methodologies that we could illustrate with this old Facebook mantra that is Move fast and break things.

Then we could say that code-breaking transcends disciplines and we could all become code-breakers if we decide to dedicate all our efforts, skills, and interests to making things better.

Our world will be better with more code breakers.

PS: I’ve not still read Walter Isaacson’s book code breaker but I will definitely get it and read it. I thought that it was important to notice this book but it is likely that it shares with this article only the title, you may know more about code breakers reading it than this article. Then go read it if you want.

Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson

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