Up There with the Big Shots

Watch this video, which features some of the brightest lights in programming (a couple of whom I’ve been privileged to meet), to the very end. You’ll see someone familiar:

That’s right, after some serious programming luminaries — Matz, Guido, Linus, DHH, Bill Joy, James Gosling, Sir Tim, Marc, Woz, Rasmus, The Gu, Sergey, Dries and finally Zuck — whose face and accordion do they close with at the 1:04 mark? This guy’s:

I laughed when I saw Mark Zuckerberg’s photo fade out and mine fade in. “Zuck’s my opening act!” I exclaimed.

My photographer friend Adam P. W. Smith (my old business partner; together, we were datapanik software systems and we worked on some pretty interesting projects back in the late ‘90s) took the picture back in August when I was visiting him in Vancouver. I’d arrived a day early for the HackVAN hackathon and was sitting in his kitchen getting some work done when he decided to get a couple of shots. He poured me a glass of scotch, set it on my accordion, which I’d set down on the chair beside me, and staring taking pictures.

I’d like to thank New Relic, a software performance monitoring service based in San Francisco, for picking my face to represent the developers out there. I’m honoured!

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.