Have you ever had a moment when you were awestruck by meeting someone?
Everyone must have had one. I met Rob Savoye. Rob is a veteran software developer and an amazing person. That was my awestruck moment and here is the story.
It was one fine afternoon at Cloudfactory, I was working on my computer and ‘ping’ came a message announcing about a presentation by a software developer from US later in the week. As I was going through the message the word ‘free software developer’ caught my attention in an instant and the fact that he’d been into software engineering for a very long time I was like “was he for real?” and you could guess what followed after the curiosity, yes I googled him : ) To my amazement I found him on Wikipedia which had every information about his great work and this left me thrilled looking forward to the presentation.
Finally the day came 20th September, 2018 when we got a chance to meet Rob Savoye at Cloudfactory office and hear about his marvellous experience. That day we all engineers were full of excitement to see him and eagerly waiting to listen to his long journey in engineering field. He started his introduction and gradually began telling us his story about his passion for computers and that he started programming computers in 1977. He had a huge experience in designing, programming and was involved in projects like GNU/Linux projects, embedded systems, GCC, GDB, DejaGNU, Gnash and the Autotools. Also he had worked on Debian, Red Hat, many other free/open source software projects and the list was endless. He chuckled on how IT sector was quite different back then and how drastically it had changed over the years. He seemed to know about every technology and his learnings seemed to have never stopped.
Besides his interest in computers, I was surprised to know he was outdoorsy for climbing (rock, ice, winter mountaineering, caving etc.) and emphasized that one needs to take a break and have fun at the same time. His passion and enthusiasm left us awestruck because a man of his age would easily retire in Nepal but he was still there all active with different projects in hand. Also the fact that he did programming his entire life and he never changed his career made us feel amazed.
Soon after the presentation followed volleys of questions and interactions with the engineers that were even more fascinating to learn more about him and his projects. Few take away from the presentation I would like to share are apart from our day to day work, we need to separate our time to do what interest us and not just limit ourselves to only technical things. Even if we are at a managerial position, we should continue our passion for coding and above all we should understand the importance of networking and push ourselves to attending conferences, meeting people and be active for you never know what opportunities will follow and how far you can excel in IT just like him only if you give it a chance.
