Pretty much everyone I’ve worked with closely has had some gift, some exceptional ability or inclination, that I really appreciated about them. A knack for debugging, an intense bias for simplicity, a willingness to either break or carefully improve things no one else wants to touch (code, conventions, habits). In a strong team these predilections are superadditive, modulo the efficiency of collective information processing. But one of the ur-skills for a coder, and probably the skill I admire the most, is change-discipline. The metaphor for software development most commonly operative for me, somewhere in the depths of my consciousness, is of a bounding fire-team.