The early days of my career were spent with a small struggling software company competing in a challenging market mostly dominated by much larger players. Our company had a different vision, some very talented people and culture of taking raw talent and honing it through collaboration and mentoring.
We had a development lead - let's call him Dave to protect his true identity as everyone knows 3 or 4 Daves. Dave was an unassuming genius who loved what he did and always had time for others. Within a couple of years of professional development, I had seen Dave perform some extraordinary feats of technical mastery and I aspired to be just like him. I thought I was getting pretty good at what I did, but Dave was the guy that all the devs looked up to and relied on when things broke in ways that no one else could fix.
Then a strange thing happened...
