Cory Doctorow reports on the Life Hacks presentation at O'Reilly's ETech conference:

HACKERS <HEART> PLAIN TEXT

Geeks store what they do in text and spurn big apps, using plain
text editors. Simplicity and speed, ease of search and
extraction, cut and paste. All you need in a filing system.

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MY OTHER APP IS IN ~/BIN

If it wasn't plaintext, there's one app that they loved, like
mail, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. The rest was little glue scripts in
~/bin, secret scripts they are embarrassed about and don't share
with others, though it turns out that they're all really similar.

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SUPER PROLIFIC GEEKS DO IT IN PUBLIC WITH COMPLETE STRANGERS AND
LIKE IT. OH YES.

(don't put this on your car)

Geeks get their credibility and prolificness out of sharing
everything -- put it in public and the public organizes it for
you. Put it on a Wiki and others will fix it.