Daniel Terhorst-North
Consultant, coder, coach, originator of Behaviour-Driven Development, midwife of DevOps
Daniel Terhorst-North uses his deep technical and organisational knowledge to help CIOs, business and software teams to deliver quickly and successfully. He puts people first and finds simple, pragmatic solutions to business and technical problems, often using lean and agile techniques.
With thirty years of experience in IT, Daniel is a frequent speaker at technology and business conferences worldwide. The originator of Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) and Deliberate Discovery, Daniel has published feature articles in numerous software and business publications, and contributed to The RSpec Book: Behaviour Driven Development with RSpec, Cucumber, and Friends and 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts.
He occasionally blogs at https://dannorth.net/blog.
The best programmer I know
I believe great programmers are not born, they are made. Or rather, they make themselves, carefully and deliberately over time. I am not talking about the folks who rote-learn the l33t answers and throw their egos around; I mean the ones who build great products using simple, understandable code, while lifting up those around them.
I have worked with some great programmers over the years, and met some others along the way. I want to tell you about the best programmer I know. To start with, they have “an insatiable curiosity and the belief they can convince a computer to do anything. Plus a healthy disregard for language and tool zealotry.”
You might recognise some of their traits in yourself; you might decide you want to aspire to some of them; you might choose to refer to them as an interviewer, or as a candidate. My hope is simply that you find this useful and in some way inspiring.