This talk by Rich Hickey had a tremendous influence in how I approach my work:
https://youtu.be/f84n5oFoZBc

His Hammock Driven Development is my absolute favorite when it comes to work principles in programming/engineering. It also the one that is the hardest to explain to most PMs and leads because it can look like you are slacking off while others are producing hundreds LOCs. That you'll write better, less error prone code that won't need as much QA iterations is something you first have to prove to them but to me, it's well worth the effort.

If you have 40 minutes of time, do yourself a favor and watch the video. Maybe it'll have as much influence on you as it had on me 😃

I'm from New Zealand, and was working in the business side of things but really wanted to learn more tech. Saw a course in the states I really wanted to do, spoke to the admissions person and they said I can initially do a 4 week course then a 8 week bootcamp. Decided I would go but turns out I needed more "experience" when I spoke to one of the instructors.

Was super disappointed I had travelled all the way to America only to be denied a place, but the same instructor said if I did all the tasks she gave me I could get in. 2 years later I'm a full time dev and will never go back.

Really appreciate my instructors belief in me to go the next step, my life would be so different (and empty) if it weren't for her!

An old hillbilly named Bill, who started programming on patch panels in the 60's. Imagine that if you will. He taught me to be persistent, not to fear mistskes, and never take myself too seriously.

My dadddddddy, he got me a computer when i was 6/7 and i used to go on it everyday (mostly ms paint drawing the most bullshit stuff 😂 and pirating games like gta vice city 😍) and then when i turned 10 he told me about programming and he introduced me to scratch loved tht shit😍 so i started teaching my self VB.net , the regular beginner copy paste and then when i was 12 i finally learnt c# and i downloaded unity, unreal engine and cry engine and tons of others but stuck with unity and now im just waiting for school to finish so i can start to do programming with out being interrupted by homework🙄

The guy that influenced me the most was Pieter Hintjens. He came to train us about one specific technology and thrown away basically everything I was ever told and replaced it with something that made huge sense. He wrote several books, really recommend those even if some of them are more social than technical.

Sure, there were always people who influence me. Actually, I like to feel when superior manager or officer could help me to develop myself.
Nevertheless, there was one man who opened for me this "Pandora box". He was my first computer class teacher. I was 10. After next two years I got my first money for localizing ZX Spectrum games.

Who has influenced you most in your work?

-PIZZA 🍕

This guy!

Basically...