Taking the Time to Thank Your Mentors

In the latest issue of Objc.io, Andy Matuschak (a former lead UIKit engineer at Apple, now elsewhere) writes about his experience at Apple:

I was fortunate enough to be able to pester a few people into spending a fair amount of time teaching me things, and in certain cases I made mistakes egregious enough to have people spend their time teaching me things without requiring pestering. […] The industry is an interesting place right now, because it’s flooded by new grads, and the new grads are noisy and they’re on Twitter and they’re the ones that are speaking at conferences. But this industry has been around for a while. And there sure are a whole lot of software engineers with 15 or 20 years of professional experience in the field, and they’re not as noisy. You don’t read stuff by them all the time. They’re mostly locked away in companies, where they can’t talk, but they sure do know a lot.

On a spectrum from total beginner to one of Matuschak’s obscure mentors, most days I still feel like a newcomer. But when I dare to peek at my code from a few years ago, it’s obvious how much I’ve matured as a developer. There are lots of people to thank for that growth. Matuschak’s interview brought to mind all the people who have mentored me. Some of them might not even realize how much they were teaching me at the time.

So to:

and many others — thanks for taking the time to help me grow.

|  14 Jan 2015