I respect Jon Skeet very much and it's by his book that I learned C# when I needed. I do feel that we tend to treat people we admire as gods, this being detrimental to the learning process. Especially in a global market without boundaries, like the software industry, it's easy to compare oneself with the best of us and this ends up being quite depressing. We shouldn't forget that such people are humans as well, continuously learning, improving and prone to do mistakes like the rest of us. Here is an example: <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1426754/linkedblockingqueue-vs-concurrentlinkedqueue/24439878" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1426754/linkedblockingque...</a>
I thought Jeff Dean was the 'Chuck Norris' of programming. He designed (with others) a lot of Google's biggest infrastructure projects as well as multiple iterations of the main search infrastructure.<p>Among others, the projects he's worked on include:<p>Spanner - a scalable, multi-version, globally distributed, and synchronously replicated database<p>Some of the production system design and statistical machine translation system for Google Translate.<p>BigTable, a large-scale semi-structured storage system.<p>MapReduce a system for large-scale data processing applications.<p>Google Brain a system for large-scale artificial neural networks<p>LevelDB an open source on-disk key-value store.<p>TensorFlow an open source machine learning software library.<p>See
<a href="http://www.wired.com/2012/08/google-as-xerox-parc/all/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/2012/08/google-as-xerox-parc/all/</a><p><a href="https://www.quora.com/Who-is-Jeff-Dean" rel="nofollow">https://www.quora.com/Who-is-Jeff-Dean</a>
The common complaint about stackoverflow reputation is that it's a function of the number of questions answered and not actual skill. <a href="http://stackrating.com/" rel="nofollow">http://stackrating.com/</a> gives an Elo rating of stackoverflow users, where you're rated by how well you answer relative to others (sort of like a ladder).<p>Jon Skeet is #2 on the Elo scale, so not only is he answering a lot of questions; his answers get upvoted more than others. He really <i>is</i> giving good answers, in addition to being quite prolific. Eric Lippert might be the more interesting data point, though -- despite being 23rd in reputation, he's #1 on the Elo scale.
This is my favourite Jon Skeet Answer: <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6841333/why-is-subtracting-these-two-times-in-1927-giving-a-strange-result" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6841333/why-is-subtractin...</a><p>It's not because he gives a wonderfully description of the problem and solution that makes you fully understand what happened. What makes it incredible It's that he solved it so comprehensively in 15 minutes from the time the poster asked the question. Most high calibre devs would be still wrapping their head around the problem after 15 minutes.
I've personally had questions answered by skeet.<p>It's totally unbelievable how quickly he understands the question and types out an explanation with code.<p>It actually boggles the mind how he can have a job and answer questions all day.<p>Here's an example<p><a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3489197/is-there-a-shorthand-for-form-begininvoke" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3489197/is-there-a-shorth...</a>
Amazingly there's things even the Chuck Norris of programming doesn't know:<p><a href="http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet?tab=questions" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet?tab=questions</a><p>He's only asked 39 questions (about one for every 1000 answers), but I'm charmed by the fact that they're real questions, usually not particularly esoteric or "advanced".
Turns out even Jon Skeet needs to ask how to "efficiently fetch a Mercurial change log in TeamCity."
Seeing someone as the beginning and more importantly end of a given topic is dangerous, but so is the lack of inspiration and aspiration.<p>Jon's never claimed to be something he's not, he's contributed a massive amount of value by being such a major earlier contributor to a system that's grown to help millions of people daily. Nothing is perfect, but not aspiring to inspire for fear of being seen as something you're not will never help anyone.<p>Jon is awesome.
While he sounds really intelligent, SO points are a really bad way of determining that. And the artical the story mentions is mostly about fame and publicity, not the best. I've had the pleasure to work with and know a few developers that should have be up there, but they work on commercial projects.<p>SO can be very swayed by names and becomes cliquish. There are a few ppl that have massive points that have questioned SO's methodology and scoring.<p>Sounds like an interesting guy, but the story seems really flawed.
Jon Skeet answered several questions I had when learning c#, he's been an inspiration to me and extremely helpful on my journey!<p>His "C# In Depth" book is fantastic as well.
"All his Stack Overflow work is unpaid, done purely to help millions of people around the world he will never meet."<p>Atwood did an amazing job gamifying Stack Overflow, but I think it is worth considering that while the contributors gain little from the site financially, that was not the case for the founders.
I heard that when Jon Skeet divides by zero, instead of throwing an exception he gets thrown a thumbs up. Out of respect.<p>I also heard that Jon Skeet can't run Array.pop() because the entire array collapses out of sheer terror.<p>Did you know that Jon Skeet can fix any memory leak just pointing at the computer and saying, "No."
The 'Chuck Norris' reference comes from this long-but-amusing meta thread: <a href="http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts" rel="nofollow">http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts</a>
I just haven't stumbled upon a lot of posts answered by Jon Skeet even though I've always heard of him as the Chuck Norris of programming through SO. Is that because I'm not a C# developer?
hmmm, I thought Jeff Dean was the Chuck Norris of programming:<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/astounding-facts-about-googles-most-badass-engineer-jeff-dean-2012-1" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/astounding-facts-about-google...</a>
Just how meaningful are these "reputation points" that make this guy number one?<p>If Visual Basic was the language with the most number of beginners and programmers, and I had the best answers to Visual Basic questions, I could be Chuck Norris instead.<p>But I don't find Visual Basic challenging or interesting. Neither C# or Java for that matter.