My whole life growing up my mom repeatedly told me a phrase that my dad used to say (apparently a lot): “Give credit where credit is due”. If I had to pick the lessons that were reiterated to me the most as a child, that would be in the top five. The notion that giving someone appreciation isn’t enough, but rather, you should actively seek out the opportunity to give someone credit when it’s owed to them. It’s a pretty powerful thing.
It’s easy to get wrapped up in our own ideas and pursuits and not be able to see how we got where we are and who it was that helped us along the way. There are many areas in our lives for us to be appreciative, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the collective opinions of people around us that end up making our own. It would be haughty to think that anything we say or feel is actually of our own creation, instead of realizing that we refined or derived it from someone who ultimately inspired us (whether is be subconscious or not).
As a kid, I was in love with the Mega Man video game series. What enthralled me the most was the fact that you could absorb the abilities of your opponents upon defeating them (thereby making you the “Mega Man”). This interested me even more as I got older and thought about how this slightly paralleled our interactions with people in reality. Obviously we’re not out to defeat our friends and colleagues, but there’s no doubt that we “gain abilities” as it were by being influenced by the opinions and ideas of others. In effect, all of our individual intelligence is nothing more than a personal slant on the overall collection of ideas that we’ve absorbed throughout our entire life.
There are also a special class of people who have created unique ideas completely of their own initiative, who we would label as geniuses. But, I would argue that despite the fact that the idea in question might be unique, they absolutely were influenced by someone in some capacity. Nothing in life is new, we’re just refining the same ideas over and over again until they reach the point of satisfaction for the current state of our society. As society changes, so do the ideas.
When you think of it like that, it’s hard not to feel indebted to those people who influenced your thinking. It’s one thing to be given a tangible gift, but it’s an entirely other type to have had wisdom shared, leaving you with the opportunity to do something with it. When I say “wisdom shared”, I don’t just mean someone who is giving a talk at a conference, or doing a podcast, or writing a blog post. Any of those things on their own are just sequences of words that we interpret either visibly or audibly. Where those mediums transform between empty words and wisdom is when the person speaking is transmitting more then just words, they’re transmitting passion.
The smartest person in the world would be completely useless if they didn’t know how to articulate their ideas in a way that caused us to understand not only what they’re saying but where they’re coming from. The harder you have to work to deduce value from someone’s ideas, the less worth there is to continue listening. It’s kind of like the attempt to use ethanol as a source for fuel. Sure, ethanol is a valid fuel alternative to petroleum, but the amount of resources and effort that it takes to process corn into usable ethanol makes the whole process almost useless (not to mention the fact that you still need petroleum to operate most of the process).
The other day, Alex James (who is an incredibly smart guy) was asking on Twitter whether the best programmers are the ones who are most well-rounded. This is obviously a fairly subjective question, but my answer was yes. I say this because my interpretation of “best”, in the context of software developers, are the ones who are most capable of participating in the inspiration of the team as a whole. The more well-rounded a developer is, the more areas he is capable of sparking the idea that might lead to success. The inverse of that is that a well-rounded developer is also not going to be a roadblock for an idea permeating. In my experience, nothing kills the morale of a team like someone who doesn’t understand something, and translates that misunderstanding into disapproval of the idea.
It’s too easy to overlook those guys who strive to be as well-rounded and articulate as possible and make an effort to really share their passion for software development with others. Working at Microsoft, I have the pleasure to interact with some pretty amazing people on a daily basis and I can’t even begin to express my appreciation for it. The following is a list of people that I believe have been integral in my growth as a developer in the last year (excluding the “celebrity developers” that everyone already knows), who I’d love to see start having a broader influence:
- Jason Olson
- James Senior
- Matias Woloski
- Dave Reed
- David Fowler
- Pablo Costantini
- Johnny Halife
In many ways, that group makes up what I would consider part of my “collective intelligence” (yes I’m overloading that term). Between language design, business/startup trends, web development, identity/security, and everything in between, I’ve learned an immense amount from those guys, and will continue to learn.
The point of this post wasn’t to namedrop, but I thought I’d throw out a couple names of people that I feel deserve a shout out, and hopefully encourage them all to blog more 
Whenever I hear people complain about the state of the .NET community, I just can’t help but feel like they haven’t found the right people. Our community is absolutely loaded with the right people, unfortunately some of those folks aren’t nearly as vocal as others. I’m sure there are tons of awesome people in the .NET space that I’m missing out on by not knowing. The question is: how do we surface these people out? Simple: give credit where credit is due.
