Death and Distributed Systems with Pieter Hintjens

Pieter Hintjens grew up writing software by himself. The act of writing code brought him great pleasure, but the isolated creative process disconnected him from the rest of the world. As his life progressed he became involved in open source communities, and he discovered a passion for human interaction.
Open source software succeeds or fails on the strength of the community. One story of success is ZeroMQ, a popular open source distributed messaging system that was started by Pieter Hintjens. In this episode, Pieter gives his thoughts on human nature, distributed systems, and death. “A Protocol For Dying” is a blog post Pieter wrote recently, where he discussed his terminal diagnosis of cancer, and how it has reframed his perspective on life.