David D. is a Software Engineer at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Colleagues describe him as "I've been working with Dave over the last few months as he helps build support SSO features into our enterprise platform. I've also advised him on a handful of command-line tools he has built to make the lives of the support team easier. Even over the last few months of working with him, I've seen Dave's talents really develop. In his SSO project, Dave successfully negotiated a series of treacherous open-source Ruby projects to add in support for XML processing and other features deep within the logical stack of a SAML integration. This involved a lot onion peeling, a little yak shaving, and a lot of grit and critical thinking. He managed to fix some very thorny problems, and then even bring those fixes back to the open-source community. To me, this characterizes some of the more admirable traits an engineer can have. Dave is an avid learner, and much of what he knows about software is self-taught. What sets him apart from many engineers who have picked coding up themselves is that he knows when to ask questions, and he knows which questions to ask. He's taken an interest in learning from the experience of others, and applying it to his own personal growth. This kind of self-awareness and measured study is the keystone of a true autodidact -- one who values craftsmanship as much as knowledge for its own sake."