Gerald Marvin Weinberg (1933–2018). Started at IBM in 1956, managed OS development for Project Mercury (1959–1963). Published 40+ books and 400+ articles. Career arc: IBM programmer → psychology of programming pioneer → systems thinker → consultant → quality management theorist → teacher/mentor. His meta-thesis — programming-as-human-activity — unified six decades of work. Won the J.-D. Warnier Prize (1993) and Stevens Award (2000). Founded weinberg-and-weinberg consulting, co-founded the aye-conference, and through virginia-satir's influence developed the application of family systems therapy to software organizations.
The three major phases of his independent career each produced foundational work: the psychology-of-programming-era-1970-1979 established his intellectual identity; the consulting-and-systems-era-1980-1989 was his most prolific decade; and the quality-software-management-era-1990-1999 produced his magnum opus. His late-career-teaching-and-self-publishing-2000-2018 phase saw him embrace self-publishing and community building. Weinberg earned his doctorate in Communication Sciences in the phd-communication-sciences-1963 event at the University of Michigan, and later worked closely with ken-orr and other consultants in the systems design community. Late-career interviews including the developer-on-fire-weinberg-2017 and spamcast-grandfather-of-agile-2015 podcasts offer his retrospective view of six decades of work.