Out of the Cuckoo's Egg

The Cuckoo's Egg is a narrative that follows the exploits of Cliff Stoll as he pursues an elusive hacker. The novel itself was quite engaging, but what impressed me the most were the characteristics that Stoll expressed as he pursued this hacker; these characteristics would be useful for any computer engineer to develop. The first characteristic is persistence. Stoll's hacker slowly chipped away at network security for around a year before he was caught, but Stoll himself had to match the hacker's persistence with his own. The second characteristic is creativity. I don't mean creativity like finger-painting in kindergarten, I mean the ability to use imagination to generate applicable ideas and solutions. But what I enjoyed the most from Stoll's adventures is the fact that Stoll was not the best or brightest in his field; he was an astronomer who had dabbled in computers before and happened to stumble upon an error of a couple of cents in an accounting record. The underlying fact that I took from Stoll's experience is that the future can be shaped not only by those possessing the most knowledge and skill but also by those who observe the world with persistence and creativity.