The Other Other Road Ahead

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Dec. 1st, 2007 | 12:31 pm

Here's a bit from Founders at Work.

Livingston: How did you know Trevor?

Graham: Trevor was in grad school with Robert. I asked Robert, "Who's the smartest grad student in the computer science program?" and he said "Trevor." I couldn't believe it actually, because at the time I thought Trevor was a total goofball.

Livingston: But you were soon convinced he was talented?

Graham: Trevor is a prodigy, in the original sense of the word. When we first recruited him, we asked him to write this little piece of image-manipulating software, to kind of test him out. For 2 weeks we heard nothing from him, and I had pretty much written him off. Finally he sent me an email asking me to come to his office to see what he'd done. I went there expecting to see this new image software, and instead he's rewritten our entire system in Smalltalk— everything I wrote, plus everything Rtm wrote.

I basically said, "OK, you're hired. Now go and write the damn image software, because we're not rewriting everything in Smalltalk."

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Comments {3}

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from: [info]netytan.myopenid.com
date: Dec. 1st, 2007 11:20 pm (UTC)
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Shame, I'd like to see a company use something cute like Smalltalk exclusively :).

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from: anonymous
date: Dec. 2nd, 2007 02:34 pm (UTC)
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There are a few and many more are rising... Smalltalk will bloom soon (or is blooming), so will erlang.

Don't let me even get started on lisp...

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I knew Trevor ...

from: anonymous
date: Dec. 2nd, 2007 05:05 pm (UTC)
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back in his hometown of Ottawa Canada.
I was working at BNR (Bell-Northern Research, the R-&-D branch
of Nortel, sorta 'Bell Labs'-lite). I was a reasonably well-trained
smart young programmer - Trevor was an incredible 'kid' who
was as much at ease taking apart Honda Civics as building new and novel applications of (pre-RFID) wireless technologies. He had been
working 'part-time' - more like playing - at BNR since high-school.

To paraphrase Keanu Reeves - Whoa!

I learned a great lesson: not the ego destroying there-is-always-someone-smarter-than-you; instead:

I am a better {programmer, nerd, geek, etc} when people
like Trevor are around.

I have come across similar folk a half-dozen times in my
20+ yr career and it is the number ONE criteria I use to select
what to work on - is there someone like Trevor involved?

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