IT Mentors

Working with my colleague today, we were both talking about some of our IT mentors and inspirations:

His:

1)Bernie Galler
2)Grace Hopper
3)Wirth
4)Dykstra

Mine (in order of my life experiences), some not nearly as well known

1) My father who planted the seed and provded me the resources
2) My first computer tutor (name being researched)
3) Jeff Wilkins and Compuserve
4) Scott Nelson (my first Oracle mentor, 1991)
5) Micro Electronics, Inc. (Bill Bayne, Rick Cooper, "Lt." Mark Craven, "Cmdr" Larry "Cannonball" Sturtz, Belinda Turner, Greg Dun, and others)
6) Bill Joy, Larry Ellison, Ken "Dr. DBA" Jacobs, Woz, E.F. Codd
7) Turing
8) Rick Morrison (Access Guru, Columbus)
9) Raul Navarro Cantu, Gregg Houghton, Sue White, Matt Long (Temple-Inland)
10) Everybody at Moser Consulting...Suhy, Dustman, Howland, Ty, Brice, Ritesh Jariwala
11) Tom Kyte, Linus Torvalds, Rick Tucker and the xwave crew, Larry Gusto
...well you get the idea...

State of IT

After 20 years in modern IT some thoughts...

• Everybody who has a mobile device is an "IT Expert"
• Not as much appreciation for what we do...oh well...
• We need to be "greener" in what we do as there is only so much AC to go around
• Extreme programming is the way to go
• Throw hardware at the problem
• Backup! Backup! Backup!
• Developers really need to learn "how" to test, not just test-cases