Technology Heroes

When I registered at Foo Camp I was handed this card that asked the usual stuff, name, company, what not. But it also asked me who my technology heroes were. Which is an interesting question that took me off guard. I didn't give it a whole lot of thought at the time. I ended up writing Larry Wall and Dennis Ritchie. But in hindsight my real technology heroes are Dave Thomas and Rich Kilmer. Each for a very different reason.

First off, you should understand that I'm not into the bit shuffling thing. I've been in this game too long to get excited about syntactic sugar. I'm looking for stuff that fundamentally changes how we, as programmers, do what we do. And that could be bit twiddling, or it could be architectural or something change in process. And that's why I love Dave Thomas. Not only is he a great guy who is fun to hang out with. But his books will alter how you think about what we do as programmers. The first book I read of his, The Pragmatic Programmer, changed my life. I had been living in a hell that only years of C++ can induce. And I read that book and it brought the passion back into my work and has lead to all of the code, books and articles that I have written since.

Dave's Ruby pick-axe book was also an achievement. He caught the Ruby bug early on, knew that it needed documentation, and went after that. And in so doing he opened up Ruby to a much wider audience. But Dave's shining achievement has been in his latest Ruby on Rails book. It's both a technical achievement, and a summation of so much well researched information on web development best practices. And these aren't B.S. best practices like you would find in some awful architecture book, I'm talking about real world stuff learned from developing applications for customers.

Rich Kilmer I admire for a totally different reason. I admire Rich because he is absolutely tireless in his work. I've met him a couple of times now and every single time he has something new to show that is well thought out and implemented. Now he is into Flash in a big way, and that's cool. I mean, really, whatever he wants to do. Because it pushes the boundaries. And that's what interests me nowadays. Don't come to me with yet another persistence framework, or some new graphics API, unless it does something completely new and novel, or does it in a fundamentally different way.

For example, Rails. I had seen web technologies before that worked on the method level before. But nothing as clean as Rails. And that, combined with the dynamic object stuff and the code generation is a really powerful mix. In fact, I would say that Rails is one of those 100% projects. A project that is so clean and well done that you know that the guy behind it put absolutely everything he had into it.

Now that I think about it some more, this is really an excellent question. We all need heroes in our field. People that we look up to and want to be like. Not only technically, but as people.

Anyway, I'm really interested in who you might look at as a technology hero. And if you met them, what you would ask them.

At Foo Camp I had lunch at a table with Dave Thomas, Andy Hunt, Larry Wall and Martin Fowler. All of whom are heavy, heavy hitters. At one point a guy sat down next to me and asked me why we weren't talking about Perl. And I gave him just a look as a response, like, why are you asking me? Ask Larry some Perl questions. I wasn't going to because, frankly, it's all been asked before.