[anonuser123456]

There are a lot of not-sexy but highly impacting skills in systems programming.

For example, the most productive person I've ever met, is a master of shell script, all the various shell tools (with obscure flags and usage modes), has deep knowledge in the use and application of makefiles, is a perl wizard and knows lots of tricks for virtualizing/replicating things in non-obvious ways.

When this person wants to automate a task, he can do it immediately, without having to think about 'how do I xxx'. It just flows from his fingertips because he knows all of these 'basic' things. Since so many things in SW are automatable, this gives him a non-linear advantage against nearly all his peers. He can dedicate 50% of his time building tools that act like a multiplier for the 50% of his production work and gets 500% done.

[dgb23]

This seems to be an amazing quality. Would you say that his work is sharable across users or are they too specifically tailored for himself (maybe a bit too "write only") or very specific to a task?

[anonuser123456]

He writes very generalizable stuff, and has an uncanny sense for picking the right blend of extensibility and concrete behavior. That is, he doesn’t get bogged down in ‘what if’. but at the same time his stuff usually can be extended without too much trouble.

The only drawback is he documents very little, and as a consequence you have to be willing to dig through code to get the value out of his work.

[dgb23]

Sounds like something to aspire to!

[gaws]

What are some of his tasks that call for perl?