Top 50 facts about Jon Skeet

If you don't know who Jon Skeet is read Jon Skeet facts. There aren't many people in the world that come close to his level of knowledge and passion for C#. In fact he mentioned to me the other day that: "I have a copy of the C# spec on every machine I work on." Jon is currently, by a pretty large margin, the highest-ranking user on Stack Overflow. He's also written a few books on the subject. There is no one, anywhere, that could do a better job on this production. Can Jon Skeet ask a question that even Jon Skeet can't answer? Yes. And he can answer it, too.

C# is a lovely language in many ways, but it's not perfect. Mistakes made early in a language or platform's development are often impossible to fix afterwards, so this talk isn't a set of suggestions for the C# team. Instead it's a reflection on what we might do if we had a time machine. Which features which seemed like a good idea at the time have actually caused the development community hours of frustration? Which choices have caused confusion? What could we do differently next time?

When Jon's Code Doesn't Compile, The Compiler Apologizes

Here some real facts about Jon Skeet life:

1. Jon Skeet is immutable. If something's going to change, it's going to have to be the rest of the universe.
2. Jon Skeet's addition operator doesn't commute - it teleports to where he needs it to be.
3. Anonymous methods and anonymous types are really all called Jon Skeet. They just don't like to boast.
4. Jon Skeet's code doesn't follow a coding convention. It is the coding convention.
5. Jon Skeet doesn't have performance bottlenecks. He just makes the universe wait its turn.
6. Users don't mark Jon Skeet's answers as accepted. The universe accepts them out of a sense of truth and justice.
7. Jon Skeet does not sleep.
8. Jon Skeet can divide by zero.
9. Jon Skeet's SO reputation is only as modest as it is because of integer overflow (SQL Server does not have a datatype large enough)
10. Jon Skeet is the only top 100 SO user who is human. The others are bots that he coded to pass the time between questions.
11. Jon Skeet coded his last project entirely in Microsoft Paint, just for the challenge.
12. Jon Skeet does not use exceptions when programming. He has not been able to identify any of his code that is not exceptional.
13. When Jon Skeet's code fails to compile the compiler apologises.
14. Jon Skeet does not use revision control software. None of his code has ever needed revision.
15. When you search for "guru" on Google it says "Did you mean Jon Skeet?"
16. There are two types of programmer: good programmers, and those that are not Jon Skeet.
17. Jon Skeet once answered one of my questions 42 seconds before I asked it. It is my belief that he employed a super computer and Infinite Improbability Drive technology to achieve this result.
18. When Jon Skeet points to null, null quakes in fear.
19. Donald Knuth wears a "Jon Skeet is my Homeboy" t-shirt to show off at parties.
20. Jon Skeet is the traveling salesman. Only he knows the shortest route.
21. Jon Skeet can make the Kessel run in under twelve parsecs.
22. Jon Skeet took the red pill and the blue pill, and can phase-shift in and out of the Matrix at will.
23. Jon Skeet has root access to your system.
24. The Dining Philosophers wait while Jon Skeet eats.
25. Jon Skeet knows the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow.
26. Jon Skeet has more "Nice Answer" badges than you have badges.
27. Jon Skeet saved the Princess.
28. when Jon gives a method an argument, the method loses
29. when Jon pushes a value onto a stack, it stays pushed
30. when invoking one of Jon's callbacks, the runtime adds "please"
31. drivers think twice before they dare interrupt Jon's code
32. Google is Jon Skeet behind a proxy.
33. Jon Skeet does not recognize anonymous types in .net .. he knows everyone of them and where they live.
34. Jeff Atwood bought a monster GPU just to calculate J S's rep on SO... CPUs don't cut it anymore.
35. J S doesn't answer questions on SO.. he stares them down till they answer themselves.
36. MSDN is a post-it J S wrote when he was four.
37. Godzilla is a japanese rendition of Jon's first visit to Redmond.
38. When J S does a search on Google.. the only result is "I'll be right back".
39. J S returned intellisense and got his money back!
40. The 'Jigsaw Killer' didn't die of cancer.. he died of heartbreak. JS kept leaving 'same time next week :)' post-its in his traps.
41. Norman Bates lives a normal life today... J S fixed the unwanted callbacks and rewrote Mother.Dispose()
42. J S took out Harry Callahan with an anonymous delegate before he could say 'do you punk?'
43. When J S presses F5, the Garbage collector collects itself.. there is no other garbage.
44. Contrary to popular belief, there is enough J S to go around.. and then some.
45. Jon Skeet can throw an exception further than anyone else, and in less time
46. Jon Skeet can code in Perl and make it look like Java
47. Jon Skeet can stop an infinite loop just by thinking about it
48. Jon Skeet doesn't need a debugger, he just stares down the bug until the code confesses
49. Jon Skeet once wrote an entire operating system in his sleep on a Treo with no battery, powered only by the force of his will
50. Jon Skeet uses Visual Studio to burn CD's.

Jon Skeet - Stack Overflow Dev Days London 2009 from Carsonified on Vimeo.

References

Jon Skeet: Coding Blog

Jon Skeet's C# and .NET articles and links

http://csharpindepth.com/

Jon Skeet twitter

Summary

One of the hobbies of Jon Skeet is helping other developers on sites such as Stack Overflow. All developers tend to be like him. What do you think about Jon Skeet?

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