Fitzpatrick & Collins-Sussman

The Myth of the Genius Programmer

A pervasive elitism hovers in the background of collaborative software development: everyone secretly wants to be seen as a genius. In this talk, we discuss how to avoid this trap and gracefully exchange personal ego for personal growth and super-charged collaboration. We'll also examine how software tools affect social behaviors, and how to successfully manage the growth of new ideas.

About Brian Fitzpatrick

Brian Fitzpatrick started Google's Chicago engineering office in 2005. An open source contributor for over 10 years, Brian is the engineering manager for several Google products, a member of both the Apache Software Foundation and the Open Web Foundation, a former engineer at Apple and CollabNet, a Subversion developer, a co-author of "Version Control with Subversion", and a resident of Chicago.

About Ben Collins-Sussman

Ben is a tech-lead and manager for Google Code's project hosting service. He was one of the founding developers of Subversion, and later helped port it to Google's Bigtable infrastructure. He also has a degree in mathematics, plays banjo, writes musicals, and takes lots of photos.

Time and Location

Friday, October 16th at 7:45 PM in 1404 Siebel Center