If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
-Sir Isaac Newton

In my short computer science career, I’ve already felt the influence of others. We’re all only human, so it’s impossible for us not to be influenced by others, both good and bad.

Those who fall into the category of good influences for me:

NC State University

There isn’t one person that stands out as an inspiration from my time at NC State, but as a whole, they gave me a solid foundation in Computer Science from which to build upon.

Bob Martin

He provided some training to Lulu.com and ever since then I’ve had his wisdom rattling in my head. He taught me I should be professional in my career. He expounded good coding practices. He reminded me that everything takes time. When talking about poorly written code, he pointed out that however long it takes to get into a mess, that’s how long it’s going to take to get out.

Randy Carter

Because he was always willing to talk design with a developer who didn’t know the first thing about it.

Kevin Smith

Kevin took me under his wing while he was my coworker and has provided me innumerable tidbits of knowledge. Some of it was small, like providing me an OPML file of his blog roll, which gave me a jump start on the blogs I should be reading.

Kevin is also a huge Erlang fan, and he infected me with a curiosity for the language. While I haven’t yet devoted my life to programming Erlang, the exposure to functional programming has been invaluable. It has expanded my horizons beyond Object Oriented programming and my code has improved because of it.

Kevin convinced me to attend the No Fluff Just Stuff conference, which was an awesome experience.

Most of all, Kevin always answered my incessant questions, which means a lot to a young programmer.

Thanks Kevin, and thanks to all my influences. I appreciate what you’ve done for me.

Thanks to Chad Fowler for asking the question: Who are your influences? So, who are your influences (Chad also needs to answer his own question)?