I need inspiring people
I am beginning to see the end of my journey of my what is to be 5 and a half years of university. It is going to be a big relief to finally be able to go fulltime on work, but at the same time I’m saying goodbye to a whole lot of stuff. Besides the steady stream of new and enlightening knowledge that I have had the pleasure of enjoying through the last 4 and a half years, I am also somehow saying goodbye to a lot of enlightening people, who have helped evolve the way I think and approach things. There are so many people who each influenced me, but a few stand out:
In the early years of my university, my fellow student, David H. Hansson, really got me going with getting serious about my code and the way it is created. He introduced XP to me and all that comes along with it such as unit testing, refactoring, serious use of patterns, etc. As many, I still enjoy watching his footsteps over at 37 signals.
Later, it was Lene Nielsen who, with her different approach to user-centered design with a film-manuscript background, could give another kind of feedback to ideas. Her response to my approach on user-centered design, which much more represents a software engineering approach than her own, inspired to new ideas. Only a few professors at the university have such an ability to inspire.
I just started writing my master thesis on (among other things) communication of requirement specifications from designers to programmers through narratives (ie. personas) instead of through written documents, at Microsoft. I truly hope that they will be my last and best source of inspiration in all my years of university.
When I finally finish university, the large network of inspiring people is not to be taken for granted anymore. I hope I can change my approach to being inspired from this reactive approach to a new and better proactive approach.
Man, it’s going to be a lot of work!