SDWest 2006: My McConnell Moment

Jeff Atwood

09 Mar 2006 — 1 min read — Comments

I’ll be attending SDWest 2006 all next week (March 13 - 17) in Santa Clara, California.

If you’re attending, let’s meet up somewhere! I’ve met a handful of people in person at past conferences:

The highlight of SDWest, however, will hopefully be meeting Steve McConnell, who is giving the keynote on Monday.

McConnell was my first coding hero.

I discovered his book Code Complete in 1994 and it was a revelation. Programming is such a solitary pursuit, and particularly so in those pre-internet days. In Code Complete, I found an amazingly passionate, incredibly literate, and consummately professional programmer to learn from. Code Complete convinced me that writing software is what I want to do for the rest of my life. The book – now upgraded to version 2.0 – has been my bible ever since.

Update: Steve was very gracious, talking at some length with me both before and after his keynote. He even signed my copy of Code Complete 2. As he said, “I guess I should sign on a page with a Coding Horror:”

"To Jeff Atwood with every good wish. Hope my signature isn't too horrifying!" – Steve McConnell, Santa Clara CA, March 13, 2006

Who are your coding heroes – and why?

Updating The Single Most Influential Book of the BASIC Era

In a way, these two books are responsible for my entire professional career. With early computers, you didn’t boot up to a fancy schmancy desktop, or a screen full of apps you could easily poke and prod with your finger. No, those computers booted up to the command line.

To Serve Man, with Software

I didn’t choose to be a programmer. Somehow, it seemed, the computers chose me. For a long time, that was fine, that was enough; that was all I needed. But along the way I never felt that being a programmer was this unambiguously great-for-everyone career field with zero downsides.

Here’s The Programming Game You Never Asked For

You know what’s universally regarded as un-fun by most programmers? Writing assembly language code. As Steve McConnell said back in 1994: Programmers working with high-level languages achieve better productivity and quality than those working with lower-level languages. Languages such as C++, Java, Smalltalk, and Visual Basic have been credited

Doing Terrible Things To Your Code

In 1992, I thought I was the best programmer in the world. In my defense, I had just graduated from college, this was pre-Internet, and I lived in Boulder, Colorado working in small business jobs where I was lucky to even hear about other programmers much less meet them. I

Recent Posts

The Road Not Taken is Guaranteed Minimum Income

The dream is incomplete until we share it with our fellow Americans.

Let's Talk About The American Dream

A few months ago I wrote about what it means to stay gold — to hold on to the best parts of ourselves, our communities, and the American Dream itself. But staying gold isn’t passive. It takes work. It takes action. It takes hard conversations that ask us to confront

Stay Gold, America

We are at an unprecedented point in American history, and I'm concerned we may lose sight of the American Dream.

The Great Filter Comes For Us All

With a 13 billion year head start on evolution, why haven’t any other forms of life in the universe contacted us by now? (Arrival is a fantastic movie. Watch it, but don’t stop there – read the Story of Your Life novella it was based on for so much

I’m feeling unlucky... 🎲 See All Posts

Related posts

Recent Posts