He wasn't a programmer, but a big beard UNIX admin. Of everyone I've worked with in my career he has had the most influential. He taught me 2 core things.

1. Information is meant to shared. 2. Never do manually what can you write shell script to do.

I started at $MEGACORP on the help desk. One day I noticed one of our AIX servers had a volume filling up. So I send him an IM that says "Hey I noticed that the log partition on server BLAH is filling up". He immediately called me and told me that the server does partitions, but instead used logical volumes. He then spent the next two hours explain in detail how logical volume manger worked, how to manage volumes and the implications it had with our SAN. At the end of the call I made a comment that I was surprised he was sharing all this information with me. He responded that he didn't want the type of job security you get by hoarding information. He instead wanted by job security by enabling the team to preform at its best, and he believed you achieved that by sharing knowledge. That phone call was only the first of many such calls.

The second thing is that he believed in automating everything you could. Using knowledge he shared with me, I quickly automated most of my help desk duties. Because of this I started working more with the system administration team and was moved onto it after just a few months. In my 20 year career every job I've had has revolved around automation. I really enjoy it and without his influence I would have never gone down this path.