Uh oh, Ian Griffiths has linked to me. I guess that means that I'm officially in the firing line.
If you Google for Ian Griffiths, you get Ian himself. He is officially the most important Ian Griffiths in the world. Sadly if you do the same for Dave Minter, you get the Lotus chief engineer dude. I have to admit that's quite a lot cooler than some random Java guy. Actually the fact that I'm #2 in preference to the mycobiologist seems kind of unfair too.
I know Ian pretty well, even having shared a house with him at one time. I was present when he wrote his first ever Java program but he's forsaken the One True Language to become a total .NET guru. His particular thing these days is WPF, but he's generally a bit of a propellor head and when I have a tricky technology question Ian's the first person I think to ask. Actually Ian's love of detail is such that I play a game with a mutual friend. We compete to get the highest question to response length ratio. So far I think I'm winning with "Why dot NET?" at a magnificent eight pages, but I'm sure he'll surpass himself soon.1 2
Part and parcel of being a technical guru is writing decent technical prose. As well as various technical articles and his excellent blog entries, Ian is probably best known for the three books he's written (in various editions): Programming Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Mastering Visual Studio .NET, and .NET Windows Forms in a Nutshell. I believe he's currently working on a new edition of the WPF book to cover the latest features and enhancements.
Ian is the prime mover behind this blog because a couple of years ago he wrote his own simple blog software to pursue his punditry. Ian having rattled off the software, partly driven by his loathing of unhackable URLs produced by some of the existing offerings, I felt obliged (driven by envy actually) to write my own to prove Java was just as good. Unfortunately I'm notoriously flakey on personal projects. Nobody's paying me to finish them, so I feel no sense of urgency whatsoever. I also tend to get about 80% through and then decide to rewrite the things from scratch. Again, personal projects are enjoyable precisely because you can make this sort of decision that would be professional suicide in the day job.
In the end it's Ian's encouragement (or "nagging" as he puts it) that got me to finish the wretched thing. It also helped that he admitted the minimalist approach he'd taken to writing his own blog software, giving me the excuse to follow suit. The approach works well, but it's hard to believe Ian's site is so simple behind the scenes given how slick it looks to the end user.
1I hereby propose that a very long comprehensive (and comprehensible) answer to a very short frivolous technical question be known as a Griffithsism by way of atonement.
2This specific example is completely fictional, but that's the general principle of the game and it accurately reflects the kind of response ratio Ian provides!