Rubenerd

Longer time readers of my blog here would have read my lamentations about the fall of really high quality personal blogs and the rise of homogeneous, interchangeable blog networks with hundreds of writers, so when I find an amazing personal blog I have to share it!

The Reinvigorated Programmer is written by Mike Taylor, an intensely fascinating 41 year old developer and palaeontologist, what a combination! He has a real flair for writing and an obvious passion for what he does which makes his posts even more enjoyable to read; as opposed to the posts I write here which are usually quite terrible. Admit it! :)

The bottom line here is that writing is an art. You can hack your way through to producing tolerable text without being an artist, just as an uninspired programmer can bash his way through to wiring together an uninspired web application. But just as it takes a Ken Thompson to invent and write UNIX, and a Dennis Ritchie to invent C and write the initial compiler, so it takes a Brian Kernighan to write The C Programming Language.

And it takes Mike Taylor to write The Reinvigorated Programmer. :) His blog covers programming ranging from classic and fully working BASIC applications for the Commodore VIC-20/VC-20 to C, Perl, Java and Ruby along with some of his other interests including (but not limited to) Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the latest Doctor Who. That reminds me, I need to check that out. I really liked Tennant, but people say the Eleventh Doctor is pretty good too.

As I've said about Jim Kloss, the lead developer and guru over at Whole Wheat Radio, if I turned out to be even half as interesting, intelligent and friendly as people like Mike Taylor I know my life would be set. People like Bill Gates and Larry Ellison aren't my heroes and idols, they're people like Mike.

By the way, the photo above is of Mike and his three sons sitting in front of… a whale skull. Amazing!