#Hackers prodigy software#
It’s safe to say that most governments are not staffed by officials who share much in common with Tang, a trans woman, open-source software hacker, startup entrepreneur, and the youngest (at 35, in 2016) person ever to be appointed a cabinet member in Taiwan. She is simultaneously whimsical and serious, a butterfly who doesn’t shy away from heavy lifting.
#Hackers prodigy crack#
It’s like her habit of closing presentations by quoting from the songwriter Leonard Cohen (“There’s a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in”). One of the fun things about Tang is that no one who knows her is at all surprised when Daoist philosophy pops up in a discussion of governmental Covid-19 containment strategies. “All I did was to hollow out the clay to make a pot,” Tang says. She pulls chapter 11 of the Dao De Jing, a 2,500-year-old classic of Daoist philosophy, up on her monitor, and starts reading: She hearkened back to first principles: The portal was an example of her “Daoist approach” to political and social action. For Tang, the significance of the mask map portal was its function as a space for others to participate in. (Google also helped out by waiving Maps charges in the interest of fighting Covid-19.)Īlthough Tang is an accomplished software programmer with a long record of significant contributions to international open-source software projects, she was quick to minimize the extent of her technical contributions to the mask app project. At the same time, while holding her regular open-to-anyone visiting hours, she whipped together her own website to serve as a central clearinghouse for an ensuing profusion of mask availability apps. She invited them to take the data and play with it as they pleased. After receiving approval, she posted the news of the new tracking system to a Slack channel frequented by Taiwan’s civic tech hackers. By February, with dozens of deaths being reported in Wuhan every day, Taiwan was on high alert. But as soon as the first reports of trouble in Wuhan began trickling out on social media in late December, Taiwan had started organizing one of the world’s most successful mobilizations against Covid-19. Out-of-stock stores turned red.Īt the time, the World Health Organization was still a month away from declaring a global pandemic. Convenience stores stocking masks showed up in green. In the space of a single morning, he put together a website using Google Maps to coordinate the crowdsourced info pouring in from the messaging app. Friends and family were swamping LINE, Taiwan’s most popular messaging app, with up-to-the-minute reports saying which local convenience stores still had masks in stock-or were completely out.
Howard Wu, a 35-year-old software engineer, watched as Covid-19-induced stress levels rose in his social media feeds. In early February, Taiwan had a mask supply problem.
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