Mark Pilgrim is a software developer, writer, and advocate of
free software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...
. He authored a popular
blog
A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...
, and has written several books, including ''Dive into Python'', a guide to the
Python programming language
Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with the use of significant indentation.
Python is dynamically-typed and garbage-collected. It supports multiple programming p ...
published under the
GNU Free Documentation License
The GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the r ...
. Formerly an accessibility architect in the
IBM Emerging Technologies Group, he started working at
Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
in March 2007. In 2018, he moved to
Brave.
Early life
In 1992, while a sophomore at
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...
and a part-time employee of Cornell Information Technologies (CIT), Pilgrim and another student, David Blumenthal, embedded a
computer virus
A computer virus is a type of computer program that, when executed, replicates itself by modifying other computer programs and inserting its own code. If this replication succeeds, the affected areas are then said to be "infected" with a compu ...
, MBDF, into three games. In February of the same year, Pilgrim, Blumenthal, Randall Johnson, and Eric Sooros uploaded the games from Cornell's Upson Hall computer lab to a public server at
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
. The four used false mainframe accounts created by Blumenthal, then also a CIT employee The virus caused disruption to Macintosh computers internationally.
The origin of the virus was first identified by Claris employees in Wales on February 14, and was traced to Stanford, and then further to one of Cornell's mainframes. Cornell's access logs showed the uploads were made from several computers in the lab while Pilgrim was working there. Sooros was granted immunity from prosecution in return for his grand jury testimony against Pilgrim, Johnson, and Blumenthal. Pilgrim and Blumenthal were arrested and initially charged with computer tampering in the second degree, a Class A misdemeanor. The FBI investigated to determine if federal charges were warranted, though no additional charges were filed. After facing disciplinary hearings, none of the four implicated continued as Cornell students.
In September 1992, Pilgrim and Blumenthal pled guilty and were later sentenced to 520 hours of community service, forfeiture of seized computer equipment, and payment of nearly $2,500 in restitution to Cornell and other affected parties. Johnson pled guilty to a lesser charge and was sentenced to 450 hours of community service.
Books and articles
''Dive into Python''
Pilgrim's book ''Dive into Python'' is a teach-by-example guide to the paradigms of programming in
Python
Python may refer to:
Snakes
* Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia
** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia
* Python (mythology), a mythical serpent
Computing
* Python (pro ...
and modern software development techniques. It assumes some preexisting knowledge of programming, although not necessarily in Python. The first edition was published in 2004 (), and a 2009 second edition () covers Python 3. Both are available online as well as in print.
Much of the book consists of example programs with annotations and explanatory text, and it generally describes how to modify an example to serve new purposes. One early example program reads through a directory of
MP3
MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...
files and lists the header information, such as artist, album, etc. Other topics covered include
object oriented programming
Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of " objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of p ...
,
documentation
Documentation is any communicable material that is used to describe, explain or instruct regarding some attributes of an object, system or procedure, such as its parts, assembly, installation, maintenance and use. As a form of knowledge manageme ...
,
unit testing
In computer programming, unit testing is a software testing method by which individual units of source code—sets of one or more computer program modules together with associated control data, usage procedures, and operating procedures&md ...
, and accessing and parsing
HTML
The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...
and
XML
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...
.
Other works
*
''Dive into Accessibility'' a free book on web accessibility, for web designers
''Dive into Greasemonkey'' a free book on
Greasemonkey
Greasemonkey is a userscript manager made available as a Mozilla Firefox extension. It enables users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to web page content after or before the page is loaded in the browser (also known as augmen ...
.
*
Dive into HTML 5', a free book on
HTML5
HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HTML ...
*
Pilgrim has also written a monthly column
Dive into XML' for
O'Reilly
O'Reilly ( ga, Ó Raghallaigh) is a group of families, ultimately all of Irish Gaels, Gaelic origin, who were historically the kings of East Bréifne in what is today County Cavan. The clan were part of the Connachta's Uí Briúin Bréifne kin ...
's XML.com.
Open source work
Pilgrim contributed to a number of open source works including
Feed ValidatorUniversal Feed ParserGoogle Doctype
Pilgrim was a vocal critic of
Creative Commons
Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...
licensing, which he believed needlessly cluttered the licensing environment of open source software.
"Disappearance" from the Internet
From 4 October 2011, Mark Pilgrim's various websites (diveintomark.org, Dive into HTML5, Dive into Accessibility, Dive into Greasemonkey, Dive into Python, etc.) returned HTTP status
410 Gone.
He also deleted his Twitter, Reddit, Google+ and GitHub accounts. On 5 October 2011
Jason Scott
Jason Scott Sadofsky (born September 13, 1970), more commonly known as Jason Scott, is an American archivist, historian of technology, filmmaker, performer, and actor. Scott has been known by the online pseudonyms Sketch, SketchCow, The Slipped ...
tweeted that Pilgrim himself was "alive/annoyed we called the police". Commenting on the event, a writer for ''
The Economist
''The Economist'' is a British weekly newspaper printed in demitab format and published digitally. It focuses on current affairs, international business, politics, technology, and culture. Based in London, the newspaper is owned by The Econo ...
'' wrote that the concern showed for Pilgrim's well-being demonstrated that "the internet, often mocked as impersonal and uncaring, can be quite the reverse."
Both Pilgrim's actions in October 2011 and
why the lucky stiff
Jonathan Gillette, known by the pseudonym why the lucky stiff (often abbreviated as _why), is a writer, cartoonist, artist, and programmer notable for his work with the Ruby programming language. Annie Lowrey described him as "one of the most u ...
's similar disappearance in August 2009 have been described as "infosuicide".
The incident was reminiscent of Pilgrim's 2004 hiatus from blogging, which lasted approximately 18 months. In 2004, rather than deleting his content, he posted a short entry entitled "Every Exit" in which he said, "It’s time for me to find a new hobby. Preferably one that doesn’t involve angle brackets. Or computers. Or electricity."
''Every Exit''
Mark Pilgrim (archive.org)
References
External links
*
*
*
''Dive into Python'' - The complete text can be downloaded in a variety of formats
''Dive into HTML5'' - The full copy of Mark's online book
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pilgrim, Mark
1972 births
Living people
Place of birth missing (living people)
American bloggers
American computer programmers
Google employees
Free software people
People from Apex, North Carolina
Python (programming language) people