Hackers and Painters is a collection of essays by Y Combinator founder Paul Graham about what makes a good computer programmer and how you can code the future if you are one, making a fortune in the process.

Paul Graham was one of the early adopters of the internet, having launched a company called Viaweb in 1995, which was the first business to offer an online application as a service. They allowed their users to set up their own, very simple online stores. Three years later, the company sold to Yahoo! for about $50 million.

Today Paul is mostly known for founding Y Combinator, one of the most successful venture capital companies in the world, with investments in over 400 startups to date, some of them household names like Dropbox, AirBnB and Stripe. Paul has also started writing essays about programming, startups, entrepreneurship and other topics, some of which were bundled up in this book and released in 2004.

His story is the prototype of how tech entrepreneurs can become a success and he's making great use of it by spreading what he's learned and inspiring others to do the same.