Neil Dyer

I'll never forget the first day that Neil worked with me at a large consultancy and development client.

Neil had joined Objective from ActiveBook?, the high-powered, ambitious and researchy Cambridge, ARM-centric attempt to use Smalltalk in the race to create a new breed of pen-based handheld computers in the early nineties. [I also well remember visiting Momenta, a Californian company with some uncanny similarities to ActiveBook? in those days, and hearing about a budding Smalltalk guru there ... what was his name, Kent something or other. There may still be some lessons to learn from that time you never know.]

Anyway, I'd warned our main report at the client about Neil. [They called DaveSteffe Information Systems Manager but he only got that job title because he had been mauled by a grizzly bear in Alaska.] Although Neil was very good academically and as a Smalltalk programmer of many years I wasn't exactly sure how he would take to the consultancy environment - or how it would take to him for that matter. It was definitely worth a try though.

I needn't have worried. Neil had had next to no introduction from me to the project, which at least at the time was considered both commercially critical and extremely complex in its goals and evolutionary plan. So Dave gave him about a ten minute overview.

Neil stopped him and in his diffident way summarised in one sentence what he understood to be the purpose and challenge of the whole project from the limited cues he had been given. Dave sat there stunned - but neither by the insolence or the ignorance. He just got a piece of notepaper out from his desk and said "Let me write that down for my next report for the directors".

As others who went on to work closely with Neil testified to me, we had never come across anyone who could pick up so quickly any thread of conversation about anything related to a business project and software (and most other subjects in between) and make a unique (most often tremendously useful!) contribution to it within minutes.

--RichardDrake

If it's the same Neil Dyer, I believe I met him recently on a course. Is he now working for IBM? --StuartBarker

Yes, let him know his ears should be burning

It was actually an IBM Consultancy course, so he was probably bullied on to it for a brain washing like the rest of us :-) --SB

Thanks for the complement Richard. Probably overstated, but then I would say that. Having finally gotten around to looking at this page maybe it won't be too long before I add something more useful. --NeilDyer

Neil!!!!!! It's me! Sean Charles... I had no idea you were famous dude, and I thought we had the best of you at Blandford for two years. Thanks for the chinese and for some reason I can still see the big steel cooker with a million gas burners in Ringwood. Man, I miss those days. Thanks for turning me into a Smalltalk addict. Life has been unbearable since you dumped Squeak on me, I sell the Big-Issue now as I couldn't cope working with other languages. Get in touch!

Welcome stranger. Between you and me I need all the help I can get to communicate with this strange AmericanCulturalAssumption crowd.

It's also kinda weird how I just created RespectedSoftwareExperts and only then I noticed you'd finally arrived, O respected IBM object guru!

In fact it's kinda scary that you never know when those ThingsOnWikisMind are going to throw a curve like this from left field (how am I doing here peeps?).

--RichardDrake

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