They changed a lot about how I worked, and by far their main characteristics were patience with us and a sort of completeness to whatever they wrote. It just arrived, maybe with one small adjustment or bugfix, bug never with a rearchitecture or major refactor required.
It’s been a decade or so since I worked with Isaac and I looked him up to find he is at OpenAI. Fitting.
I'll throw out Mr. Hedger Wang from Yahoo! as my nominee, he basically had the IE6 browser renderer in his head, and even though I never worked with him directly, just being able to ping on Y!M was an incredible help.
What made it special (2010-timeframe) was that we would do without thought what other companies struggled to do at that time (hot-hot failover, multi-region, "3 machine minimum" deployments), processing traffic for ~500M monthly users when spinning rust and 32gb of ram was considered "a lot".
My perspective on what happened is reeeally smart people solved really tough problems, then would either bail to Google (and later FB) to write the "v2.0" and solve those same problems but "better" or they'd go and start a full-blown company to sell that solution.
The tide rose around Yahoo! and both business-wise (and tech-wise), they didn't keep pace once their competitive advantage of "we can scale" dissipated.
I stopped caring too much about who the best in the room was after 7-8 rounds of this. As Nietszche would say these are not Ubermensches but the last men in a nihilistic swamp. Creatures who have attacked and destroyed older moral frameworks without replacing them with anything new. For their own comfort and survival.
The kind of people who pretend they have mastered complexity, but in reality its just survival theater and political/power games. Ubermensches haven't emerged yet.
The opposite of the overman [Übermensch] is the last man: I created him at the same time with that. Everything superhuman appears to man as illness and madness. You have to be a sea to absorb a dirty stream without getting dirty.
They knew when to write code or when to stitch existing software together. The code they wrote wasn't easy to understand nor did it follow any good "software engineering" practice. But they could get an MVP out the door faster and better than a 5-7 developer team. This person was never arrogant and everyone from developers, customers and managers loved them.
Then one day, he gives me freestanding C code that was superbly written, with some macros for benchmarking, etc. For the most part it worked but needed some massaging for edge cases and such, but it was so beautiful and solved my immediate needs. I was unblocked but the whole ordeal has since been imprinted in my mind. He didn't give any context when handing the code, but I later figured out he implemented the algorithm as described in RFC 815. Deep in the annals of history and literature in networking that isn't really covered by any contemporary networking text books or sources.
Anyways now that I'm a mentor/tech lead these days, I'm always looking for my opportunity to help unblock someone by writing some very specific hard to implement code.
When you explain a concept to another human you have to provide context and a certain level of detail. It can be hard to calibrate based on who you talk to. What always blew me away about this guy was he needed like almost 0 context, even for non-programming subjects. He understood within seconds what you were doing, even for complex problems. I had to recalibrate my entire approach to explanation with him because he got things instantly.
- Whimsical, child like attitude. "Sure, I can do that" was almost always the answer.
- Would come in on the weekend when nobody was there and you'd see them cooking. Then on Monday, they'd reveal their work and it'd be something that seemed impossible last week.
- Had deep understanding of the hardware so that diving in and writing some specific assembly-like (or literal assembly) code was part of their toolkit.
- Were treated as a Goose That Laid The Golden Egg by management. Could do whatever they wanted, but they loved to work and code so it wasn't ever out of balance.
- After a few years of working at the studio they started to have mental health issues because there was a never ending stream of needs and problems, many of which were solved with them. Planning projects started to include several technical miracles they would pull off. It started to be expected.
Nowadays writing straight to the metal in video games is less common, so I think these types of guys have largely migrated to other fields. We used to write our own engines and there was more need for them. Now there's a lot more use of third party engines so there's less opportunity (and need).
What I found most interesting about this excellent developer, and of course she was absolutely excellent at her job writing Java as well, was her secrecy. She did not mean to reveal her ability to masterly address CSS and JavaScript concerns to me. She did so because she knew I was super new and it didn't matter. She did not reveal this to anybody else, because she didn't want to compensate for the repeated failures of people around her. In hindsight I can absolutely see why she went out of her way to suppress her capabilities while at the office.
Her name is Jalaja Ramanadham. She became my manager.
He taught me that developers are difficult/impossible to control and to not be possessive or emotional about code. He also taught me tools and tricks in Linux that I still use today.
He was brilliant. Could understand a very deep and complex business system and remember all the hundreds of table and convuluted logic built into the system, but it was a bit overwhelming listening to him talk since he would overload so much information in such a short time frame
Maybe the better word is clever or brilliant. I have also worked with other programmers who build such systems, I think the best programmer just builds simple things
That said, I wouldn't have wanted to work with him in a commercial environment. It was a way of thinking/programming I could never wrap my head around.
This individual, inherently understood that the method with which they communicate, could be different for different individuals. As a result they changed their messaging, their body language, their wording, depending on with whom they communicated. They still said the same thing(s), but it was how.