When I met him he was 30. Very skilled engineer and he’s on one or two AWS talks for “how we use AWS”. He was also a terrific manager to me but left because he

When I met him he was 30. Very skilled engineer and he’s on one or two AWS talks for “how we use AWS”. He was also a terrific manager to me but left because he wanted to spend more time developing so he’s now an early employee at a startup. The second one was the CTO of a company we acquired. Truly the intellectual superior of nearly every person I know. Mid 30s. Helped write a well-used standard. Funnily enough, while both were great at the leaps of logic often necessary to build new exciting things, both were also remarkably well-disciplined in code. People often tell me that writing good commit messages or variables, indenting their code, writing tests get in the way of their expression or iteration. These guys just did it in passing. I’ve watched them work and they didn’t consciously do it. Like a Navy SEAL and trigger discipline. It wasn’t exceptional. It was the default. Oh and, the young chap who was 21 or so when I was a grad student who wrote lots of cool utilities at uni. Once, in my insecurity, I remarked that I’d love to work on stuff like that if I had the time (being a grad student). He told me I should make time if I actually loved it that much. Graybeard wisdom from a child. Well, it was good advice.