Listening to the latest iDeveloper Live podcast in super-fast mode (QuickTime Player 7 FTW!), John Fox brought up the idea of thanking people. Perhaps this came up because it's now November, month where Thanksgiving happens, but I thought that would be a great idea. So in this post, I'm going to thank a few people who have helped me in my professional life. It is impossible, and it would be boring, to try to go through everybody in the world, so I've just picked out a few people that I thought of — mostly people from my earlier Cocoa days. (Maybe I'll do another round later.)
Thanks Ken Dyke, a co-worker of mine at Electronic Arts back in the mid-nineties. When Apple bought out Next, I was perplexed — but Ken's over-the-top enthusiasm about the event sparked my interest and insatiable appetite in learning OpenStep (the predecessor of Cocoa). Without that spark, it might have been years before I started learning that technology.
Thanks Bertrand Mansion, who created the mailing list archives now called CocoaBuilder. Nowadays I'm just as likely to find a technical answer via a Google or DuckDuckGo or StackOverflow search, but back in the day, Bertrand's archives were the place to find just about anything related to Cocoa.
Thanks Dave Shea, creator of CSS Zen Garden, who showed me that it's possible to style in an infiite number of ways using CSS. This was, in many ways, the inspiration for Sandvox.
Thanks Robert MacKimmie, and the rest of the leaders of BaNG, the Bay Area Next Group, which met regularly in the late nineties and early ohsies. I was new to all of this technology, and because of these meetings, I met a lot of Ex-NeXTers who inspired me to continue playing around with Apple's inchoate operating system. Incidentally, Robert was my first introduction to the then-astonishing idea of urban beekeeping, something I now practice myself.
Thanks Tom Negrino and Dori Smith, both individually and collectively. Tom had written a review of Watson for Macworld Magazine which helped greatly with the program's success. Then one day I was in San Jose, crossing the street, when I recognized Tom by a name badge he was wearing, and we've been friends ever since. Dori has provided a lot of mentorship and inspiration to me in the fields of web design, javascript, and blogging.
Thanks Lowell Schneider, who helped me with some Cocoa mentoring during the days I was unemployed and writing Watson. I would camp out in his nearby Schema Research office once or twice a week. I remember being blown away by some of his Interface Builder palettes (now, alas, something no longer possible in Xcode) that essentially made data binding possible before it became supported officially by Apple.
OK, that's all for now — no point in getting maudlin. :-)
Who do you have to thank for where you are now?