I had the pleasure of working directly with @serialseb for a period of nearly 10 months at a client we both worked at last year. I also shared (part-time) my apartment with the chap as the client was in Belgium and he lived in London and that seemed to work out pretty well for us all. (Getting pretty decent at bowling any way!)
I therefore write this testimonial from a position of having worked with Seb and having spent time with him outside of work and growing our knowledge together outside of our client-work.
He has recently become available and I thought I'd write something about what I learned about Seb because he's a unique individual that any company should feel privileged to be able to hire.
This is immediately obvious if you've ever hung out with Sebastien after a conference or user group meeting - start talking on a subject that Seb is familiar with and you'll find yourself learning things immediately. The value of this cannot be understated - everytime I was working on a feature at our shared client I'd find myself asking Seb *"Is there a standard for this", or *"have you encountered this problem before?" - the answer would usually be yes and he would save me days in terms of design or decision making.
This is not something to be under-valued - if you want somebody to help you design an API or any sort of system at all, Seb will usually have a pattern or experience to recall to save valuable time in that area.
Seb is the KING of .NET OSS, the KING. I remember I was at a conference in Reading just after my final year of university and even then, one of my best friends was saying have you heard, there is this guy who has torn ASP.NET apart and built it up from scratch so you can build real interoperable HTTP applications with C#. This was way before NuGet, before Github existed and before most people had even considerered even using any open source .NET stuff at all - even NHIbernate.
I didn't know who Seb was at that time or that I'd be working with him in the future, but this was insane big news for me - that somebody could tear apart the monolithic framework that I was building my awful crap on top of was absolutely amazing. I sat in his talk at that conference in complete rapture and awe and never forget that this forward thinker existed back then to challenge my ideas of what I should expect from an enterprise .NET web framework.
He has worked so hard on OpenRasta, and before NuGet existed pushed very hard on projects like OpenWrap, trying to improve the abilities of open source projects in .NET to thrive as much as they do in other environments like the JVM or ruby.
The tenacity to carry on pushing open source .NET in the years where it wasn't even considered in any organsations is one of the big reasons I respect Seb - before OSS was a thing in our world he was standing up there and telling us we should be better.
In a similar vein, you can't work with Seb without realising he is very much ahead of the times in so far as ideas on software development. "You're doing it wrong and this is why" is something you become accustomed to hearing and after the first couple of discussions you realise he's been right all along.
Whether it be in terms of communication with the business, software architecture or API design if Seb states an opinion it is pretty much always the result of past experiences and a ton of research that has led to that opinion. You have a discussion around a subject and a few days later realise that the position you were arguing from was flawed and perhaps Seb is right after all.
That to me is the true definition of a thought leader, somebody who is thinking the thoughts and laying down The Way before other people have a chance to go "hey, that's obvious - why are we doing it any other way"
So many of the ways I now interact with people or design software can be directly attributed to my time working with Seb (yes, even the bits where I'm all like guys, let's be pragmatic about this, because Seb is a very pragmatic person when you get down to the issue of actually delivering software in a timely fashion with the desired quality.
Seb is not a one-man knowledge silo. The way I try to share knowledge when I work on a feature or product can be tied directly back to the time I spent with him - realising that anything I work on should be shared and understood by everybody else as I work on it.
Continuous integration is more than "deploying all the time", it's about the team having shared context all the time and not diverging down their little paths of "I'm busy, my headphones are on, leave me alone" - I learned that off Seb and it has made me a much better developer as a consequence.
It's really interesting working with Seb after following his online presence for so long - the opinionated person I know on Twitter might be the person I worked with, but the result was so much more effective than I ever imagined.
Seb will talk to the business and work out what is actually important - he won't waste time building software that isn't needed. You should give him your team and let him direct that team towards success. I advocate listening to him and doing as he says and shipping it - I cannot stress this enough.
Get in touch with the guy while he's still free as it won't last - this is my very personal testimonial and I'd like it to not go to waste. If you're doing C# and you care about design/architecture/http/etc then you're losing money by not doing so!
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note: I'm writing this because I believe in Seb, I do not have any commercial interests in this matter at all.
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