Someone that has no real internet presence, but here are the things I've tried to mimic from him:

* immense domain knowledge

* accounts for operations (in a myriad of ways)

* code comments are succinct and easy to read

* clever, but not too clever

* uses common tooling

* is a better architect than others with that job title

* communicates well and is a genuinely nice guy

I'll second this answer and expand on this:

> communicates well

The best people I work with do what they say they will do.

Additionally, your entire answer (generally) applies to pretty much any field, not just programming. But I'll also add on that great professionals understand and accept how their role supports/fits into the goals of the business.

I assume you know this person IRL?

Yep, he was an engineer that fell into an architecture role.

What does 'common tooling' mean?

Tooling (of several kinds) that is easily available - everything from editors to CICD. I recall having this conversation with him in which he explained that a large part of his job was mentoring/educating/teaching younger engineers. The example he used was in VIM - minimal custom settings and scripts so that it easily translated to others (iirc the only plugin he used was NerdTree). Keeping things basic makes it easier to teach.

Terry Davis of course what question is this.

May be rest in peace.

Thank you

Ward Christensen did some amazing things in the 1970 & 80s.

There was once a shortest useful program contest, his entry was 2 bytes long[1]

When he lost the source to a program he wrote, he created ReSource, a disassembler[2] that got forked a few times over and eventually gave us the NSA's GHIDRA

[1] https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/underground/BBSes/CBBS/199...

[2] https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/2019-January/...

Martin Thompson

Thanks!

Augusta Ada Lovelace