🔗 How to be the best programmer, according to Daniel Terhorst-North

Great programmers are not born; they are made - says Daniel Terhorst-North, the author of the viral Twitter thread on the best programmer he knows.

Or rather, they make themselves, carefully and deliberately, over time, said Dan as he explained more in detail what he had meant by ‘the best programmer he knows’ at the Craft conference in Budapest.

His presentation was inspired by a Twitter thread he wrote about the qualities of the best programmers that went viral. Dan’s blog post about the worst programmer he knows, but actually about the absurdities of measuring developer productivity, also went viral, but that’s another story.

The best programmer he talked about is a real person; he’s known that person for over 20 years. And that person is not the best programmer because they are the best at solving LeetCode or the best at solving algorithmic problems (those programmers are going to be the first ones replaced by the LLMs, says Dan).

That particular best programmer he knows doesn’t have a computer science degree, say Dan, but he’s not the best because of that. Some other best programmers have degrees. This particular one Dan described also happens to be male, but that’s also not why he is the best programmer. Some of the best programmers are female.

But why is he the best programmer, then?

As Dan says, the best programmers have an insatiable curiosity and the belief that they can convince a computer to do anything. They also have a healthy disregard for language and tool zealotry.