During a meetup organized by my friend Amy, I met Chris. He is a technical guy – very technical. Besides his work at a high-tech company, he did a lot of things technical. This is what Amy told me.

His grass is greener than all his neighbors, because he really took the soil into the lab to analyze what’s in it, and what is lacking for grass to grow. He added a lot of ingredient and makes it better.

He has a lot of helicopters, and he is good at it. He remote control them and have a lot of gadget around this hobby. He wrote the firmware for its heli, using the 16K memory.

Once his friend put her iPhone into washing machine, and crashed afterward. He opened the iPhone, removed the broken part (which obviously show some burning damage) and finally recovered the data.

The story of Chris goes on and on.

The inspiration for me is, technical people are very different. They are the driver of the advancement of the society. They are not only good at what they are trained for. The thinking methodology, and learning pattern is what made them unique.

I thought of Hax in my company. Besides a Javascript guru, he was really good at renovating his house, when he was forced to start the project. Being good at almost everything, and dive deep into the details are the common pattern you can find out in technical people. One of my favorite questions I ask technical guy during interview was, what are you good at, and then explore how deep he/she goes.

Technical thinking is not necessarily just technical. It is an atitude of life.