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To this day he does everything in PMATE macros, and is always, always hacking the world. He once entered a shortest program contest, his entry was 2 bytes long, and did two things, test and count the amount of RAM in a system.
I worked with this guy once... I was coding pure C# all day long, using WinForms... this was back in 2016, so not long ago... And then they hired this guy to develop the core intranet of a ~500 user institution. Skinny guy, quiet. Main skills: Erlang, D, OCaml and other more obscure programming languages... At the beginning I thought, "fuck me, recruitment failed miserably on this one...". I just couldn't see how he…
1 - Took care of his teammates at a level that bordered comedy. If you said in passing "oh man there's never knives in the lunch room" and he heard you, the next day you'd see a new pack of knives there. Taught me to consider every minor opportunity for improvement that life throws at you. 2 - Casualness in the face of problems. If a junior came and told him that production was down, he would just laugh and say somet…
I've done this, and it went down really well. Even if you can't cancel the meeting, you can send a single person instead of the whole team. You can also send people back to their desks if their part in the meeting is over. I was also adamant on all meetings having some sort of description and agenda, so that people can tell if it's worth attending or not. That was more difficult.
He would sit and listen up to an hour or more just hearing about your life, with maybe only 5 minutes dedicated towards crisp work stuff. Just happy to just listen.
He left before 6 everyday, no matter what, always working 40 hrs a week.
He had a lot of tragedy is his life, and emphasized how work was a secondary concern to family and other kinds of fulfillment.
He never had big ambitions to make a splash. He taught me to be content with the craft, even our decades old code base had its own challenge and fun.
I didn’t care that I worked on not-cutting-edge work. Working in that group was some of the most fun I’d had my whole career.
He taught me that it’s often best to let go, be selfless, and don’t let the larger machinations of power brokers get to you. Really care for the people and relationships around you, and you’ll be rewarded in riches more valuable than money or professional prestige.