Meeting Anders Hejlsberg, the Creator of C#

There are people whose work shapes the entire course of your career without them ever knowing your name. For me, that person is Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of C#. Last November, I finally got to meet him in person, and it still stands as the biggest day of my professional life.

Anders was the reason I fell in love with C# in the first place. Long before I ever wrote a single line of production code, I was drawn to the elegance of the language he designed, the way it balanced simplicity with power. He was not just someone who built a programming language; he was the reason I wanted to become the developer I am today. I always dreamed of truly mastering his creation, of becoming very good at the very thing he gave to the world.

That dream is what pushed me to put myself fully into C#. I picked it up from the very beginning of my career, twenty years ago, when I was still finding my footing as a developer. I stuck with it through every framework shift, every new version, every late night spent understanding why the language worked the way it did. C# was not just a tool I used, it became the foundation of everything I built, including my open-source work like RepoDB. Two decades later, that early decision to commit myself to Anders’s creation still defines who I am as an engineer and architect.

So when I learned he was speaking at the Patterns and Practices Convention at Microsoft Lyngby in November 2019, I knew I had to be there. Sitting in that room, listening to him talk about the language and TypeScript, and the thinking behind it, felt surreal. And when I finally had the chance to meet him face to face, to shake his hand and tell him what his work has meant to my career, twenty years of admiration came full circle in a single moment.

Meeting your greatest idol does not happen often, especially not one whose creation you have spent your entire career mastering. That day at Lyngby will always be, without question, the biggest day of my professional life.