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Comment by Hawxy | Hacker News Reader

I've had this linked in my work's C# guidelines for a while. It's a very useful authoritative source whenever someone decides to do something weird in async land.

FYI this is written by David Fowler, who is personally responsible for the creation of ASP.NET Core, SignalR & Nuget (maybe?).

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It's really amazing to me that microsoft, with a headcount of over 200000 people has such small teams (and amazing individuals like Fowler) for their most central technologies. Even Entity Framework has, I think, just a handful of people working on it. Meanwhile, there are thousands upon thousands of people with title "product manager". I suppose the headcounts get vast again for the Azure teams?

On the other hand maybe the success Microsoft has had lately is expressly BECAUSE there are not too many cooks in the kitchen?

Are you sure for nuget? I never saw Fowler being credited for nuget until now.

IIRC he worked in nuget. Not sure if he created it.

I was the O.G. NuGet developer, so yes, I was one of the creators.

Oh, TIL then !

David is most likely one of the 10 people who turned the .NET project around and brought it into the modern world. I met him once in a training, a humble, funny guy.

He’s one of the reasons I’m still a .NET developer. Super nice guy in person.

David has never worked on Nuget. He created SignalR and had been a huge influence on many internal parts of .NET.

As the original PM for NuGet, I can confirm that David Fowler was one of the original developers on the team that created and worked on NuGet.

And as the original dev that worked on it along with David Fowler, I further confirm this :)

https://github.com/NuGet/NuGet.Client/graphs/contributors lists his profile but not as a huge contributor. His LinkedIn page suggests he moved to another project after a year:

> SDE II 2010 - 2011 1 yr Co-creator and founding developer for NuGet package manager. Designed and implemented the dependency management engine for the core NuGet as well as several other features such as the initial NuGet server implementation.

The NuGet.Client repo was used for version 3.x and later (a major algorithm and protocol overhaul happened then). But a lot of NuGet code existed before then, e.g. https://github.com/NuGet/NuGet2/graphs/contributors (Fowler is there with many contributions).

Thanks - I know nothing of how NuGet was developed internally but would have been quite surprised if he’d made a claim like that without cause.

That graph doesn’t list him as a “huge” contributor at all… bought into the project. Committed after 4 months. Small contribution compared to others.

I should start listing projects I worked on at early stage as creator.

Claiming to be “creator” is disingenuous. Worked on it. Yes. Big contribution over a year before moving onto other things. Yes. Creator? No.

Nothing disingenuous about it. He was on the original team that prototyped and then built NuGet.

He wrote the core dependency management engine among other things. His contribution only seems small now only because the project has been around a long time with many new contributors since he’s moved on.

But you can rewind the git history to see he had a huge impact as a creator. I say this as the PM of team that built NuGet.

Weren't we working Codeplex at the time too? So I'm not convinced that the history is all there in github.

Oisin

I think you might have missed the “not” in my comment. I agree on the numbers but would not second guess whatever happened internally since I have no knowledge of how that worked.

You’re right. I did miss the not. Sorry!

Here’s the original NuGet source tree

https://github.com/NuGet/NuGet2/graphs/contributors

I don't think that's a complete view as nuget started on codeplex (!) and I think the commit history wasn't imported fully (mine is missing)

I stand corrected. Sorry.

Forgiven

Is "creator of nuget" in his twitter bio just an inside joke?

Yes, I was one of the NuGet creators.

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