My first tech job out of college, I was told to go talk to “Dave,” the guru old-timey programmer and learn the lay of the land. He turned out to be this crotchety old guy, with low tolerance for idiots, but a soft spot for someone who actually paid attention.

A few months in, I was told to go fix a feature in the company’s main product which was sold to power utilities. This was a MASSIVE code base, with a mix of C, C++, assembler, and a bit of Fortran thrown in. I spent a week poring through all the code trying to figure things out. Then I hit a mystery workflow that didn’t make sense.

I walk over to Dave’s office and ask a specific question. Now, mind you, he had worked on this years ago, and had long moved on to new products. He leans back in his chair, stares at the ceiling, then without looking at the screen once tells me to go look at such and such file for such and such variable, and a list of functions that were related. I go back to my desk and damn if it wasn’t EXACTLY as he described.

Now, I’m probably as old as he was then. I don’t remember what I wrote an hour ago. No matter what I build, I’ll always be in awe of Dave and what he could keep in his head.