I’ve been programming professionally for a few years now. While I have been, I’ve done everything I can do to help my aspirations of being awesome at writing software. In internships, I’ve sat at the proverbial feet of code gurus who were happy to dispense their wisdom. In time, I learned that their wisdom was mostly informed opinion and, if I got good enough, someday my opinions could be as well informed as theirs were. My interests in areas of software development drifted, as did the programmers I idolized. Some were coworkers or professors and some were bloggers or open source contributors. I had my test-driven development faze where I hung on Robert Martin’s every tweet. There was my infatuation with Linq, near the end of my .Net days, which eventually led to a revival in functional programming in the form of Clojure. And who could forget C and my long nights with the C89-compliant codebase I contributed to?

Most of my idols had opinions on more than just programming. I learned about coffee, startup life, and business strategies from them.

Lately, I’ve been listening to Marco Arment’s podcast and reading through his blog. He gained notoriety after writing most of the code at Tumblr and, more recently, for his work with Instapaper. Instapaper is a an app he developed on the side which turned into his full-time job.

I’m listening to this developer because, in many ways, he’s who I aspire to be in five or so years. I’m in the trenches of a startup now, where I’m having a kick ass time writing software that people are going to love to use. I don’t have any long-term plans for running my own business, but who knows. Maybe Coffee Timer will take off :)