Talking about your heroes is talking about yourself

Do you have heroes? I have many. I even have to classify them not to get confused. Musicians, environmentalists, scientists, my list is much longer. However, today I shall stay restricted to my current activity heroes. The order of appearance is random and does not imply importance.

Of course, I am being unfair to many other personalities and fallen heroes, but I have to keep this text readable. Here is how they captured my attention.

Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela revealed to me the wonders of systemic thinking. I found them Reading Fritjof Capra, who led me to know also Ludwig von Bertalanffy. The key idea is: there are no parts, only the whole.

Kent Beck recently tweeted: perfection teaches you nothing. My admiration for him began much earlier, reading Extreme Programming. The hot part is the subtitle: Embrace Change. As I am also growing as an “experienced programmer”, I also reflect his thoughts on aging. He is also my icon in the test field, along with Erich Gamma.

John Kotter has designed the best path to understand “Change”. I can’t say more, you have to read “Leading Change” to grab the idea.

I’ve seen Martin Odersky on stage at the Scala Days Conference, in Berlin, 2014. The keynote was called “The Simple Parts”. Remember: simple does not mean easy. His design of the Scala language distills, in my opinion, the state of the art in terms of programming language.

Jonas Bonér, following Carl Hewitt principles, designed Akka. The actor model is a magic ingredient to combat hidden vices in modern programming. I have to honor the name of Jose Valim (a Brazilian fellow) in this respect also. Akka builds on top of the actor model to create a vast ecosystem to create sound microservices. Thanks to Vaughn Vernon advice on this too.

Eric Evans is, perhaps, the most brilliant mind of the modern systems architecture. It is imperative for the majority of developers to know about DDD – Domain Driven Design and its relation to the so-called “Reactive Programming Model”.

Greg Young is very prolific and convincing about Event Sourcing model. My “Dream System” will be, somehow, built on ES/CQRS. I have to thank Martin Fowler for putting me on the track of Greg. 

Daniel Pink came to my attention when a friend introduced me to his book “Drive” a few years ago. I could not believe how outdated I was on the ideas of motivation (and team management). I learned with him the ideas of Edward Deci, Theresa Amabile, and others. I also read and recommend the book of Suzan Fowler, "Why Motivating People Doesn’t Work".

Sidney Dekker impressed me because of his frankness, as did before Jack Welch on the same subject. The key takeaway is: don’t hide bad news. Investigate risk. Get rid of iatrogenic damage.

Ward Cunningham coined the metaphor “Technical Debt”, a notion every team manager should deeply understand. This relates to the above Dekker’s alert.

Linda Hill taught me in his book “Collective Genius” how an inverted pyramid of hierarchy works on an innovation-oriented company. This is obviously valid for teams.

Steve Blank and Eric Ries helped me to cross the door to hear the customer. I have to mention Alexander Osterwalder on this journey too.

Adam Grant speaks of “givers” and “takers”, what makes much more sense to me than the “Myers–Briggs Type Indicator”, frequently used to distinguish psychological traits. I keep his ideas in the same portion of my mind where I hold Malcolm Gladwell “Outliers” and “Blink”, and, more recently, Dan Ariely and now the Noble Prize winner Richard Thaler – perhaps, my next reading.

As a Mechanical Engineer and Consultant, I used to spend some time on the shop floor of varied manufacturers. I was surprised to learn how few of Eliyahu Goldratt’s TOC ideas were spread at the production management middle level. I believe they are usable wherever you may find a process pipeline, like in some IT operations.

Ken Schwaber’s and Mike Biddle's seminal book on Scrum remains a cornerstone for me. The key part is chapter 5 explanation on how processes differ from repetitive, complicated, complex and up to chaotic. Another agile godfather and Scrum co-creator: Jeff Sutherland.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb teaches us how nature strengthens things. 

I left Geoffrey Hinton to the end not because he is less important. On the contrary, I hold him as the greatest genius alive of our time. This is not because he godfathers many of the improvements we have in today’s artificial intelligence scenario, but because he irradiates an aura of simplicity and obstination. If you want to have a taste of his brilliance, take a look at the interview “Heroes of Deep Learning” he gave to Andrew Ng on YouTube.

I might have forgotten a couple of brave men and women, I know. Just to be clear, I have no intention to rank people over here or to make any kind of moral judgment of actions they might have taken in their lives. My remarks are very biased, i. e., I mention them because they caused me, somehow, some reaction of enlightenment or emotion. If you want to suggest someone else, please write me in the comments.