TITLE: Gerald Weinberg Has Passed Away
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: August 09, 2018  1:03 PM
DESC: 
-----
BODY:
 I just read on the old Agile/XP mailing list that
<A HREF="https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Weinberg">
   Jerry Weinberg</A>
 passed away on Tuesday, August 7.  The message hailed Weinberg
 as "one of the finest thinkers on computer software development".
 I, like many, was a big fan of work.

 My first encounter with Weinberg came in the mid-1990s when
 someone recommended <EM>The Psychology of Computer Programming</EM>
 to me.  It was already over twenty years old, but it captivated
 me.  It augmented years of experience in the trenches developing
 computer software with a deep understanding of psychology and
 anthropology and the firm but gentle mindset of a gifted teacher.
 I still refer back to it after all these years.  Whenever I open
 it up to a random page, I learn something new again.  If you've
 never read it, check it out now.  You can buy
<A HREF="https://leanpub.com/thepsychologyofcomputerprogramming">
   the ebook</A>
 -- along with many of Weinberg's books -- online through LeanPub.

 After the first book, I was hooked.  I never had the opportunity
 to attend one of Weinberg's workshops, but colleagues lavished
 them with praise.  I should have made more of an effort to attend
 one.  My memory is foggy now, but I do think I exchanged email
 messages with him once back in the late 1990s.  I'll have to see
 if I can dig them up in one of my mail archives.

 Fifteen years ago or so, I picked up a copy of <EM>Introduction
 to General Systems Thinking</EM> tossed out by a retiring colleague,
 and it became the first in a small collection of Weinberg books
 now on my shelf.  As older colleagues retire in the coming years,
 I would be happy to salvage more titles and extend my collection.
 It won't be worth much on the open market, but perhaps I'll be
 able to share my love of Weinberg's work with students and younger
 colleagues.  Books make great gifts, and more so a book by Gerald
 Weinberg.

 Perhaps I'll share them with my non-CS friends and family, too.
 A couple of summers back, my wife saw a copy of <EM>Are Your
 Lights On?</EM>, a book Weinberg co-wrote with Donald Gause,
 sitting on the floor of my study at home.  She read it and liked
 it a lot.  "You get to read books like that for your work?"  Yes.

 I just read
<A HREF="http://secretsofconsulting.blogspot.com/2018/07/what-do-you-do-when-kid-beats-your.html">
   Weinberg's final blog entry</A>
 earlier this week.  He wasn't a prolific blogger, but he wrote
 a post every week or ten days, usually about consulting, managing,
 and career development.  His final post touched on something that
 we professors experience at least occasionally: students sometimes
 solve the problems we et before them better than we expected, or
 better than we ourselves can do.  He reminded people not to be
 defensive, even if it's hard, and to see the situation as an
 opportunity to learn:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 When I was a little boy, my father challenged me to learn
 something new every day before allowing myself to go to
 bed.  Learning new things all the time is perhaps the
 most important behavior in my life.  It's certainly the
 most important behavior in our profession.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

 Weinberg was teaching us to the end, with grace and gratitude.
 I will miss him.

 Oh, and one last personal note:  I didn't know until after he
 passed that we shared the same birthday, a few years apart.  A
 meaningless coincidence, of course, but it made me smile.
-----