Professional Influences

For distributed computing, I was fortunate to find formal training available in my college curriculum, which I have only realized of late is not an option that was afforded to many of my peers. And while that makes sense for my older peers, I find this somewhat shocking for younger ones who started school after the dawn of this era of Cloud Computing.

For performance, introductory computer classes often struggle with consistent difficulty, and my study buddy and I made a game out of making the easier assignments more difficult by handling larger inputs or returning faster results. My early career featured a good deal of work in making fast applications in ‘slow’ languages.

For human factors, my attention turned from there to effectiveness over efficiency, and the ways in which poor design can make it challenging for users to achieve what they meant or needed to accomplish. Alan Cooper and Don Norman came onto my radar, and I had many chats with peers and acquaintances with forms of color blindness or other visual acuity limitations. While not an expert in accessibility, I know enough to avoid many common mistakes.

For data visualization, long ago in a discussion about how terrible a particular graph was, I was introduced to Darrell Huff’s book, “How to Lie with Statistics”, and that sent me down a rather long road, and probably was part of my influence in human factors in general. Edward Tufte, in addition to his books, used to write/blog online, and I followed him for many of his active years. And while I often wouldn’t otherwise include Richard Feynman in this particular list, his warning about how you are the easiest person to fool, overshadows all when I think of data analysis.

For Software Engineering, I particularly appreciate the works of Kevlin Henney, Michael Feathers, Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, Jim Highsmith (paradoxes versus problems) and a number of mentors I’ve had along the way, as well as many of the people I’ve mentored in turn. Teaching is a form of learning, and we often don’t understand our own ideas without having defended them.