More on external influence ...

One factor that does affect the path(s) that you choose (as anyone - a developer, an engineer or an artist) is the kind of people you tend to come across. The good people I mean. And some people who influenced me to quite an extent include the following (in no particular order ...)

• Srinath aka Mulla - Introduced me to ctags. And impressed people with a lot of funky vim scripting stuff!
• Chirag Kantharia - Another cool hacker.
• Sitaram Iyer - have already mentioned him in some other post. This guy could code faster than most others could even think! How fast did he think?
• Sachin Sourav - Hmmm ... he seemed to know most of the arcane stuff always!
• Kailash aka Kelly - Exploits, buffer overflows, machine code. Whatever!
• Amitay Isaacs - Well, he was considered to be the God of the network of our campus, and did really cool stuff. Had an indirect influence - mostly through third party tales about him!
  

It's always good to come across good people, whatever field you are in. They raise the bar, and the passing minimum moves up by quite a margin. You are pushed to do something good!
Make sure you don't miss out on the good people around you!