Brian Amerige – Some Praise to the Developer of Flow

In this blog post I’m going to give praise to Brian Ameriage, the developer of the Flow FTP Program available for Mac OS X Leopard. I’ll quickly go through some of the ways that Brian has impressed me over the short time I have known him over the web.

1 Flow

I was involved in the Beta testing of Flow for a few months and as expected I ran into some problems. There was one, rather complicated problem that I decided to send in a bug report regarding. As a developer myself I knew what a good bug report would look like. I started from scratch, listed the steps to produce the bug (100%), etc. To my surprise I got a great personalized response:

Joe,

These issues should all be cleared up in Beta 5 (not yet released.) Keep in mind, though, that the issues you are experiencing are likely related to keychain, however, so it’s worth a shot remove all of your bookmarks, and to open up Keychain Access and remove any bookmarks tagged with “ConnectionKit Password.”

Thanks for the detailed report :-)

–
Thanks,
Extendmac, LLC.

Not only did he say that it was fixed in the next release, but he gave an indication as to what the problem was, a possible workaround, and appreciation for the report. From that point on I was sold on Flow. I continued to submit bug reports and they were all answered quickly, from a few hours to a few days after submitting them. They were all eventually resolved, and sometimes under extreme conditions. Did anyone ever wonder why there was such a quick jump between Beta 7 and 7.1 (or was it 8)? Turns out Brian stayed up past 2:30 AM hammering out some bug fixes.

2 Passion and Dedication

I think Brian’s most recent blog post, Arrogance in Engineering sheds some light on this topic: (my emphasis)

There’s a tremendous difference between an engineer on paper and an honest-to-the-bone engineer. The great kind are tinkerers. They build things in their spare time and are positively eccentric about it.

Passionate developers do the best work because they are always thinking about how they can improve things. Developing, Engineering, etc. its not a 9-5 job… its an ongoing, never-ending, adventure to improve, innovate, and create. For a number of people perfection is not a goal, its the standard. I sensed this quality in the way that Brian handled himself developing Flow, supporting it, collecting critical feedback, and keeping patient by not releasing it before it was ready.

The release of Flow has been a great success. I saw minor improvements made over the last few weeks, and even hours before the launch (I was in email contact late that night) where Brian’s attention to detail, aim for excellence, and dedication really stood out.

3 Finally, Composure

Composure is very different then Passion. The combination of the two characteristics is rare, but its something that I saw in Brian. Its especially something that I saw in a number of Brian’s blog articles (some of which I think have been lost). I remember seeing the blog posts and realizing the thought with which he put into his reasoning and his supporting arguments; knowing that what he was saying might not be the idea of the majority. Blogs are often just diaries, outlets for emotion, but those can easily be confused with rants. Either by design or not, Brian’s blog had reason and logic far beyond his years.

Brian who?

To steal a little content from Brian’s website, here is a just a small portion from his Bio:

1. In that sense, I design how software works. That encompasses engineering the architecture, writing the code, and illustrating the interface, but more importantly, thinking about how people will use it.
2. It’s not about technology, it’s about what it does. My passion is making tools for people.
3. I’m 17 years old. (And yes, I’m both embarrassed and depressed by the behavior of most people my age.)

There are Others

People like Brian are not a dime a dozen. I’ll admit he is one of my mini-heros. There are plenty others, who’s names I’ll leave out in the hope that I can contribute an entire article to them as well. But I figured I’d swallow a little of my own medicine. Now I better get back to writing some real programming on this blog before all my readers get confused!

You deserve it, Keep up the great work.
- Joe P