I think I like teams with specialisms. I can think of a few instances where things went better because people were doing things they loved, where other people would have really struggled with the same task.
I'm on ten years of trying and failing to make any sense of cmake. As a nominally C++ developer, I owe being able to contribute to the projects substantially to other people managing to make cmake do things, and periodically baby-stepping me through trivial changes to it. I'm eternally grateful to the many people who have helped me with that, though I'd also like cmake to die and go away forever.
I remember James being the right guy for release checklists. Every release he'd read the checklist (not try to remember it) so saw when it had changed. Did all the things on it, even when some sounded redundant, or couldn't possibly be worth checking. Took hours, showed every sign of enjoying the process.
I also remember Richard for wizardry with procedural arithmetic. For loops nested six deep with exciting integer arithmetic scattered across the levels implementing some AI thing, written with no indication that he was losing track of the details. Would cheerfully review code of unreasonable complexity and pick out errors in it from the browser diff.
I'm in compiler dev. Lots of applied graph theory really. Hypothetical SKI/forth chap would have better spacial reasoning than me and sometimes that's the limiting factor in the work. Thank you - it is fortunate that our current environment is supportive of language implementation work, long may that remain the case.
I'm on ten years of trying and failing to make any sense of cmake. As a nominally C++ developer, I owe being able to contribute to the projects substantially to other people managing to make cmake do things, and periodically baby-stepping me through trivial changes to it. I'm eternally grateful to the many people who have helped me with that, though I'd also like cmake to die and go away forever.
I remember James being the right guy for release checklists. Every release he'd read the checklist (not try to remember it) so saw when it had changed. Did all the things on it, even when some sounded redundant, or couldn't possibly be worth checking. Took hours, showed every sign of enjoying the process.
I also remember Richard for wizardry with procedural arithmetic. For loops nested six deep with exciting integer arithmetic scattered across the levels implementing some AI thing, written with no indication that he was losing track of the details. Would cheerfully review code of unreasonable complexity and pick out errors in it from the browser diff.
I'm in compiler dev. Lots of applied graph theory really. Hypothetical SKI/forth chap would have better spacial reasoning than me and sometimes that's the limiting factor in the work. Thank you - it is fortunate that our current environment is supportive of language implementation work, long may that remain the case.