the.com/bootstrapping
Pulling yourself up by a strap that's physically impossible to lift you — the metaphor was originally a joke.
means Getting something started or improving your situation using only your own existing resources, with no outside help.
from From the literal phrase 'to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps' — the little loops or straps at the back of a boot that you tug to yank it on. The phrase began in the 19th century as a deliberate absurdity, an image of an impossible feat (you cannot lift your whole body by tugging your own footwear). Over time the joke flipped: instead of meaning 'impossible,' it came to mean 'done entirely through one's own effort.' In the 20th century engineers and computer scientists borrowed it for a self-starting process — a small bit of code that loads the larger system — which is why we still 'boot' up a computer today.
- original meaning
- Mocking an absurd, impossible task
- computing
- Why your machine boots from nothing
- statistics
- Resampling data to fake more data
- startups
- Growing on revenue, not investors
- baron munchausen
- Allegedly escaped a swamp by his own hair
linux kernel development — linus torvalds started with minix in 1991, using existing tools to build the first version
amazon web services — jeff bezos built internal infrastructure for amazon.com first, then launched aws in 2006 by repurposing existing systems
youtube — launched in 2005 using existing flash video technology and servers rather than building from scratch