Who do you admire?

One way to tell if you're truly engaged with a pursuit is to ask yourself: who do you admire?

If you were getting into directing film or making music, this would be an uncontroversial take. In the arts, people talk about their influences all the time, even refer to themselves in terms of movements.

There's no reason not to have programmers you admire also, and the engineers you admire, both your colleagues and people you only know at a distance, end up having an influence on you in the same way that artists do.

I meet a lot of people trying to break into the tech industry. The first thing I ask them is why do they even want to?

I ask this 95% because they're usually looking for advice, and for my advice to be at all relevant requires that I understand their motivations. But about 5% of my reason for asking is that I hope I'll see a glint in their eye, and they might tell me a fun story about how they got into programming and their passion for the work. That sort of passion might re-enliven my own. It hasn't happened yet, but one can hope.

I then ask them, who do you admire? I'm not expecting much from them here, but its a good way to expand their awareness of our industry, with all of it's myths and lore.

The list of programmers who I respect has only expanded over the years, and I could still rattle off the list easily. John Carmack, Kernighan/Ritchie, Salvatore Sanfilippo, Linus Torvalds (more for git than Linux), Steve Yegge, Rich Hickey, DHH (before he went off the deep end), Thomas Ptacek, Patrick McKenzie, and I forget his name but the guy that wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications.

Those are people in the public-ish sphere, at least for our industry, but there's a much larger group of people that I've been in closer contact with that have helped shape my thinking over the years. This includes colleagues, conference speakers, or just people that run in the same circles.

This respect or admiration can be about their achievements, their worldview, their skill at teaching or something else that changes the way you think for having interacted with them. The list will be different for everyone because we each have our own pre-existing worldview and set of experiences, and so different things will resonate with us or not.

Over time you'll find that as your worldview is shaped by others, especially in our industry which is all about models, structure, and concepts, you'll develop what I'm going to call a sense of "cognitive aesthetics". Repeating patterns in thinking that started with your influences (and their influences) that simplify and generalise to many problems.

So when there are big changes in our industry like there are now, you'll be able to look to your influences and see what they're saying, then see how that gels with your feelings or intuitions as well.