Ask HN: Who is the inspiration for your thinking?

Ward Christensen taught me the joy of hacking, just modifying things to suit my will. He once told me that he heard "You can't write programs in assembler for OS/2" at work at IBM. With his help getting me the C++ compiler kit, this challenge resulted in Forth/2, a direct threaded forth for OS/2, written in assembler, of course.

Russel Reynolds taught me the nature of software development. He was the Operations Manager at Will County Generating Station, which burned coal and turned it into power. He saw computers as a tool, and one that had to be as practical and unobstructive as possible. In the 1980s, he sought out hand-held computers for recording the inspections of fire fighting equipment. He tried running them with gloves on, spilling coffee on them, dropping them on the concrete floor. I wrote the software to record the inspections. He'd pull in a person from the staff, back in the day when most people didn't have computers, and explain to them that They weren't being judged, I was, and if anything went wrong it was MY fault, he then told them what he wanted them to do, and I had to watch. I learn huge amounts about software usability in a very compressed timeframe.

Jack Woermbke taught me that you don't every upgrade software unless you actually have to. He taught me you only change one thing at a time, so you can actually know what broke things, or fixed them.

The folks at Live Marketing taught me how tradeshows work, how marketing works, and how to keep folks who have to use computers happy and productive.

Norman Teiber taught me how to make gears, and gear shaped objects, of all sorts at his job shop, Allied Gear, sold in 2019.

My friend Jim has shown me how to repair old radios, test equipment, and the like. We've repaired TVs from the 1940s, Test Equipment and ham radios of all vintages, and even a few Cesium Beam atomic clocks.

Jim Hoover from Fermilab taught me that the world isn't as it seems, you can't just take the news at face value, back in the early 1990s.

Steve Jobs and Jony Ive. Particularly one of the promo videos with Ive’s voice-over saying something to the effect of, “There isn’t anything we could remove to make it any better.”

This put some language to a shift that was already happening as a result of using the products for several years.

I’m a different person today because of this lesson and how it shifted the way I think at a pretty deep level, from purchases to problem-solving.

Related:

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Less, but better.” -Dieter Rams

For me: Primary level, Ancient eastern wisdom(Hinduism, Buddhism, Yogic texts) to attain calmness during storm/failures. Then on secondary level, modern tech people like steve jobs, engineers who build open source etc.

I got interested in civic coding because of the essays by Tim O'Reilly. When I was running the Code Michigan hackathon for a couple of years with the State Of Michigan I tried getting him as a speaker with no luck.

Username checks out.

As for me, I've come to appreciate that I'm a fairly average thinker. Mostly I just try to make things work and watch the clouds.

There are people who's thinking I admire - Stewart Brand, for example. As for Nietzsche et al, I've never really had the time.

In terms of the view that you should have as an engineer about the product i would say Steve Jobs. As for the view in life i would say Plato, Diogenes of Sinope, Nietzsche

For me, it's Daniel Kahneman and Gerd Gigerenzer.

I’d like to name specific people, but I’ve been influenced much more by my family and the people around me.

Myself

Robert Anton Wilson.

Marcus Aurelius for sure

David Foster Wallace, Scott Alexander, and Plato

Alan Watts

The Red Green Show

My dad — for curiosity and creativity, and for teaching me to go after what I want rather than assuming something can't be done.

Bryan Cantrill — for shaping how I think about building productive engineering teams, especially teams working at the messy and fascinating interface between hardware and software.

Alan Kay and Seymour Papert — for changing how I think about computers, education, and learning. The best tools don't just give people answers; they give people an environment where they can explore, experiment, and develop their own understanding.

Paul Akers, Norm O'Hara, and Ryan Tierney — for showing what Lean can look like when it leaves the PowerPoint deck and actually reaches the manufacturing floor. Continuous improvement works when the people doing the work are empowered to see problems and improve the systems around them.

Linus Torvalds — for the relentless pursuit of technical quality and the willingness to challenge decisions when the engineering isn't good enough.

Looking at the list, I realized there's a common thread.

Be curious. Build things. Learn by doing. Give people the tools and agency to improve their own work. Don't accept "that's just how we do it" as an answer. And when you want something, be willing to go after it.

I suspect I'm still figuring out how much each of these people has influenced the way I think.

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