When it comes to programming, which developers do you closely follow?
Please include blog/website/github links.
A couple of my favourites:
[TJ Holowaychuk](https://github.com/tj) - because he's a wizard. The number of premium open source projects he's been a part of, is just astounding.
[Dan Abramov](https://github.com/gaearon) - First hit on his redux talk, then drifted to his blog posts. I like his clarity of expressing the why's and how's.
— Jen Simmons: http://labs.jensimmons.com/
— Julia Evans: https://jvns.ca/
— Lea Verou: http://lea.verou.me/
— Mina Markham: http://mina.codes/
— Sara Soueidan: https://sarasoueidan.com/articles/
— Sarah Mei: http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/
— Ana Tudor: https://thebabydino.github.io/
— Anna Debenham: http://www.maban.co.uk/
In what way are the genitals of a programming blog author relevant?
Contrary to the implicit assertion you make, nothing -- not even programming (and writing about programming especially) -- is inseparable from identity. Consider, for example, that where someone grew up is likely to influence how they think and write about programming. Why would gender not also have an influence?
209 unique males were mentioned 280 times
21 unique females were mentioned 26 times
Excluding GP's comment 14 unique females were mentioned 18 times
That ratio of 209 male voices to 21 female is the reason the genitals of a programming blog author is relevant.
*There were 11 mentions where I was unable to definitively determine gender.
Women in IT talk about how hard it is for them not to be judged by their gender but by their skills and yet many of them promote their gender as if it's more important than the skills.
See you at PyCon?
I had never heard of any of these developers before, and now I'm following several of them.
I feel inspired. :)
For example when I see a new thing by antirez on HN, I am likely to click it because it's usually good stuff, but I am not going to be following his blog, etc.
The reason to follow many developers is could be due to their useful output (e.g. informative blog posts). You don't have to agree with everything that someone puts out (cult of personality) to find things that they produce useful.
There are developers that I have met in real life, whom I didn't really like their personalty, yet I still take notice whenever they put out a new project because they usually have well-thought out and infinitely usable interfaces.
Because most of them don't have time to write frequently. The people I follow tend to write once in a blue moon, but when it happens, the articles are really good and I consider it a shame to get lost in a sea of noise.
If I open my RSS reader right now, I'm sure to find 10 good articles that I like, which is not what I can say about HN on any given day.
In fact on HN I'm glad to see an item worth my click once per month. The content promoted here is really bad IMO and I only come for the discussions, which tend to be interesting as people bother to post long comments.
I find that it is better for developers to go through the exploration of ideas and to come to their own conclusions/path on the ideas that works for them. Encouraging that academic learning is much better than recommending a specific person for people to dump their time listening to.
It's a decent starting point for those just starting out in the community/open source culture to get the hang of it.
The general idea however is to keep an eye out on places like HN to general trends and follow popular/radical repositories in those areas.
However, I would strongly suggest to not fall for the trap and limit yourself to just following people / news. Get the news but dig deeper, read posts on that topic, clone and play around with repositories, create and share small projects, connect this to what you already know and create ideas, no matter how useless you think it is, read influential papers (re-read them) and get involved in conversations on them.
That is more fulfilling and impactful than following personalities.
You don't have to, but, it's probably a good thing.
In that case following his blog explains how he made that good stuff which helps in building skill and also helps others to build great stuff.
Rachel : https://rachelbythebay.com/w/
Jeff Atwood : https://blog.codinghorror.com/
Joel Spolsky : https://www.joelonsoftware.com/
Dan Luu : https://danluu.com/
patio11 : http://www.kalzumeus.com/
Recently he talked about building Stockfighter :
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/10/30/developing-in-stockfight...
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/08/20/designing-and-building-s...
Can't remember any code examples off the top of my head though.
She always has great drawings/hilarious stuff that she posts. It's really inspiring.
But he did work in Discourse and StackOverflow, which I'd say are pretty good achievements in the software industry.
I agree about putting people on pedestals, and my own experiences speak to that. The person I once saw in a very idealized way I now see as fully a person, complete with faults and failures.
I would argue that there are no "masters" - or rather, that there are very few of them, and those that I might consider such are "just people" too.
Mastery does not obviate humanity.
The most gifted (which I define as the cross-section between talented and practiced) people I know tend to care more about the content of your character than your technical prowess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66knvY3vxsA
Key lines from the lyrics:
In bedrooms across England // and all the Western world // there’s posters and there’s magazines // but the music isn’t ours
So tear down the stars now // and take up your guitars // come on folks and try this at home
Let’s stop waiting around // for someone to patronize us // Let’s hammer out a sound // that speaks of where we’ve been // Forget about the haircuts // the stupid skinny jeans // the stampedes and the irony // the media-fed scenes
Do listen to the whole thing, it's a great song.
[0] https://github.com/reactjs/core-notes - see, for instance, https://github.com/reactjs/core-notes/blob/master/2016-12/de...
In one of his videos where he talks about HTTP/2, he says "HTTP/2 is just supposed to be a better wire format for HTTP, so it's not that interesting". In an earlier video, Brad and Andrew Gerrand screencasted building a full implementation of the protocol in Golang in under 3 hours on YouTube. To the average programmer that would take days to get working and we'd be so excited when it was done we'd be telling everyone who would listen how awesome it is.
Only curious -- it seems really interesting for a personal project I plan on working on soon.
Still working through The Witness, but it's amazing. Put about 40 hours into it so far. It's the best video game I played last year.
At the very least it will be C/C++ where you don't have to type () around if expressions. So there is that. :D
James Long - http://jlongster.com/
I follow these guys for similar reasons. They always seem to be a couple steps ahead of the rest of the industry and it's frankly a little embarrassing how productive they are. Come to think of it maybe I'd feel better about myself as a programmer if I stopped following them...
That mismatch often causes frustration from people that are not used to it. In my case, it quickly went away once I understood the implicit contract.
Kenneth Reitz : https://www.kennethreitz.org/
Armin Ronacher : http://lucumr.pocoo.org/
Julien Danjou : https://julien.danjou.info/
Hynek Schlawack : https://hynek.me/
Donald Stufft : https://caremad.io/
That being said, I usually read Eric Lippert's blog (www.ericlippert.com) although, since he "switched dev environments", I find the topics less relevant (for me).
Jimmy Bogard (marten, mediatr, general architecture)
Jeremyd Miller (structuremap)
Jeremy Skinner (fluentvalidation)
K Scott Allen (typescript and genereal .net core)
Mike Hadlow (.net core)
Mark Rendle (.net on linux, funny guy)
Jonathan Channon (nancyfx)
Brad Wilson (xunit)
Damien Edwards (.net core)
Rick Strahl (.net core)
Jon Galloway (javascript and .net)
Leon Bambrick (very funny guy, knows everything)
He is awesome human being.
Jake Wharton : https://github.com/jakewharton , https://twitter.com/JakeWharton - He is well known in Android community. He has authored a lot of great libraries personally and under Square.
Mark Murphy - https://commonsware.com/blog/
Chris Banes - https://chris.banes.me/
Cyril Mottier - https://cyrilmottier.com , https://twitter.com/cyrilmottier
Dan Lew - http://blog.danlew.net/
Donn Felker - http://www.donnfelker.com
Mark Allison - https://blog.stylingandroid.com
Jesse Wilson - https://publicobject.com/
Roman Nurik - https://twitter.com/romannurik
Romain Guy - http://www.curious-creature.com/
Curtis Yarvin a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin)
Xah Lee (http://xahlee.org/)
Michael O'Church (https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/)
Bryan Edds (https://medium.com/@bryanedds)
CAT-V (http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/)
Suckless (http://suckless.org/philosophy)
The idea that someone is going through life thinking that way is more than a little depressing.
Python: Kenneth Reitz
JS: TJ Hollowaychuck
C++: John Carmack
Ruby: Aaron Patterson, _why
https://twitter.com/tenderlove/status/824322587379441664
Came for the tech, stayed for the puns and generally odd behavior.
Ian Lesnet from dangerous prototypes
Michael Ossmann and Dominic Spill from great scott gadgets
Limor Fried from adafruit
There's innumerable folks in the ham radio community who both solder and code like Hans Summers from qrp labs or Wayne Burdick from elecraft. I like the GPS clock discipline system Hans created, its not the pinnacle of esoteric control theory but its very solid engineering in that it works with minimal resources. Good engineering is making the best you can under the limitations, not like IT type work where the more baroque the better seems to reign as a value.
Ben Heck counts too.
A shout out to frankly the entire esp8266 community
the folks behind evilmadscientist (their website is down at this moment)
Nathan Seidle from Sparkfun probably count under "masters of shipping lots of working stuff"
Admittedly this is turning into a list of cool low level hardware projects that involve coding. But they do develop software and I do follow them.
- Charles Lohr http://cnlohr.net/ mixed bag of art and hardware
- Jeroen Domburg (SpriteTM) of http://spritesmods.com now at Espressif, an adept magician.
* Armin Ronacher: Flask, Jinja2, click
* Jonathan Blow: game dev, designing a new low-level language called Jai (https://www.youtube.com/user/jblow888)
* Michael Fogleman: extremely proficient Go developer; wrote a Minecraft clone in both Python and C, and a NES emulator in Go (https://github.com/fogleman)
Brendan Gregg: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/ Everything Linux Performance.
Rich Hickey/David Nolen Mentioned enough around here.
- Addy Osmani https://github.com/addyosmani - Paul Irish https://github.com/paulirish - Substack https://github.com/substack - Jeff Atwood https://blog.codinghorror.com/
Fabrice Bellard http://www.bellard.org/
Douglas Crockford https://github.com/douglascrockford
Guillermo Rauch https://zeit.co/blog
James Halliday https://github.com/substack
Terry Cavanagh http://distractionware.com/blog/
Sam Gentle https://twitter.com/sgentle
Caolan McMahon https://github.com/caolan
Gary Bernhardt, of wat: https://github.com/garybernhardt, https://twitter.com/garybernhardt
Tess Ferrandez: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/tess/ (Fantastic analysis of Windows debugging internals)
John Gruber: http://daringfireball.net/
I followed him initially hoping to learn some Excel tricks, but he mostly posts recipes and songs and political posts. I've been following him since I was about 13 years old, and I feel like his posts have really shaped my personality growing up.
I also started following these two guys after I came across an interesting post they wrote (not together):
https://plus.google.com/+EliBenderskyGplus
https://plus.google.com/+JeanBaptisteQueru
However, I've never seen an interesting post from them since, so I should probably stop following them.
Care to share three or four?
All game programmers, focused on low level C/C++ programming. I'd love to have some similar guys/girls to follow who do something at the other end of the spectrum (F#/Scala/Haskell etc) but haven't come across any that do educational streaming. I get a lot out of seeing people's workflows, as they build actual production code. Most of the functional programming stuff I follow is blogs about toy examples or ideas.
* James Halliday (https://github.com/substack)
* Paul Irish (https://github.com/paulirish)
* Addy Osmani (https://github.com/addyosmani)
* Tim Abbott (https://github.com/timabbott)
* Zach Holman (https://github.com/holman)
* Jessica McKellar (https://github.com/jesstess)
* TJ Holowaychuk (https://github.com/tj)
* Jeremy Ashkenas (https://github.com/jashkenas)
* David Heinemeier Hanson (https://github.com/dhh)
* Juan Benet (https://github.com/jbenet)
* Guillermo Rauch (https://github.com/rauchg)
Stephanie Hurlburt: https://twitter.com/sehurlburt
Scott Hanselman: https://twitter.com/shanselman
David Fowler: https://twitter.com/davidfowl
Frank Krueger: https://twitter.com/praeclarum
Troy Hunt: https://twitter.com/troyhunt
Niall Merrigan: https://twitter.com/nmerrigan
https://github.com/davegurnell
https://github.com/travisbrown
I follow a lot more but have chosen the n most interesting with a recency bias. In a few cases their blogs are way more active than github.
honourable mention for https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mechanical-sympathy
Ned created coverage.py and is one of the most famous Python devs. He explains Python concepts in a very lucid, easy-to-understand way. Going through his stack overflow answers, his tallks in PyCon are worth doing it.
Besides, most of us also had the perk of working for startups where we got to produce a lot of OSS. Anyone in that position can do the same. The only skill you need is persistence.
Hadley Wickham - https://github.com/hadley
Joe Cheng - https://github.com/jcheng5
Yihui Xie - https://github.com/yihui
JJ Allaire - https://github.com/jjallaire
Dean Attali - https://github.com/daattali
Bob Rudis - https://github.com/hrbrmstr
Kent Russell - https://github.com/timelyportfolio
Jeroen Ooms - https://github.com/jeroenooms
Beyond programming, his writings about society and how it can be explained algorithmically are very interesting to programmers.
@manishearth - rust - https://manishearth.github.io/
@bitemyapp - writer of haskell: first principles
@bartoszmilewski - haskell - https://bartoszmilewski.com/
@jdegoes - writes informative FP blog posts - http://degoes.net/
@aaron_turon - rust - https://aturon.github.io/blog/
@pcwalton - rust
@nikomatsakis - rust - http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/
@paf31 - purescript creator
@nick_r_cameron - rust
@kmett - famous haskeller
@steveklabnik - rust - http://words.steveklabnik.com/
* Dan Grossman for his amazing, succinct explanations of static typing and functional programming concepts in Standard ML
* Philip Wadler for his work on Haskell
* Miles Sabin for freeing Scala developers from fixed arities with shapeless
* Jordan Walke for React (put immutable and reactive programming in every JS dev's hands) and Reason (bringing OCaml to JS devs)
* Erik Meijer for putting monads (LINQ) in C#
* Evan Czaplicki for bringing functional reactive programming to JavaScript devs.
Tim Sweeney: https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic
John Carmack: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack
Macy Kuang: https://twitter.com/MacyKuang
Jeri Ellsworth: https://twitter.com/jeriellsworth
Ryan Speets: https://twitter.com/RyanSpeets
Harvey Ball: https://twitter.com/The_StoneFox
* Yehuda Katz - https://twitter.com/wycats
* Steve Klabnik - https://twitter.com/steveklabnik
* Aaron Patterson - https://twitter.com/tenderlove
* Charles Nutter - https://twitter.com/headius
Overzealous love of systems, I don't necessarily always agree with him but I always learn something when listening.
Brenden Gregg.
http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/
If I could import someones brain to my own, it would be his.
Kyle Fuller
Guy is like a UNIX programmer for the modern age.
David Beazley - https://twitter.com/dabeaz
Kenneth Reitz - https://github.com/kennethreitz
Not quite 100% programming, but she is always doing something super interesting. Mostly with electronics and DSP. She is an awesome hacker and very inspiring to me.
Rob Connery(dotnet,elixir,postgres) - http://rob.conery.io/
[1] https://github.com/jeffvroom [2] https://github.com/stratacode
He's a member of both Rails and Rust teams; works on database stuff for both (https://diesel.rs).
Always working on something interesting to talk about on 'The Bike Shed' podcast, which I 'follow'/would recommend in its own right.
Podcast: http://bikeshed.fm
Github: https://github.com/sgrif
Kyle Kingsbury, for his Jepsen series: https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen
Coders At Work (https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Program...)
Founders At Work (https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/...)
Architecture of Open Source Systems (https://www.amazon.com/Architecture-Open-Source-Applications...)
Architecture of Open Source Systems - Vol 2 (https://www.amazon.com/Architecture-Open-Source-Applications...)
- all the React team (Dan, Sebastian, Vjeux, Christoph, etc)
- Addy Osmani (Google)
- Sindre Sorhus (full time open sourcer)
- JD Dalton (Lodash)
- Guillermo Rauch (Zeit)
- Jeff Atwood (StackOverflow)
- Elon Musk (genius)
His probably most well-known projects are Sequel[1] and Roda[2], but he has frequently contributed to many important projects and Ruby[3] itself focusing on simplicity and performance that impacts all the ecosystem.
0: https://github.com/jeremyevans/
1: https://github.com/jeremyevans/sequel
2: https://github.com/jeremyevans/roda
3: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12024
Edit: formatting
Edit: Also forgot to mention, I really like his approach on developing frameworks with great extensibility and modularity leveraging Ruby's capabilities without 'magic'.
Martin Fowler - https://www.martinfowler.com/
Rober C. Martin (Uncle Bob) - https://sites.google.com/site/unclebobconsultingllc/
- Brad fitzpatrick -- http://bradfitz.com/
- Julia Evans -- https://jvns.ca
- Raymond Hettinger -- https://rhettinger.wordpress.com/
- Rich Hickey -- https://changelog.com/posts/rich-hickeys-greatest-hits
- Peter Bourgon -- https://peter.bourgon.org/
- Rebecca Murphey -- https://rmurphey.com/
- Daniel Greenfield -- https://www.twoscoopspress.com/
These developers have a unique way of looking at problems. I've gained a lot of valuable knowledge from them.
-----------
There are two things that I commonly see: 1. You have to fail in your first startup to understand. 2. Just because you had that experience doesn't mean the same person will
I don't fully agree. The fact is, you can always take heed of advice from ANYONE who has run a startup, gained experience, knows what works and what doesn't; and feel pretty confident that those people know what they are talking about.
When it comes to startup.. no need to jump right in and fail like so many others. There are plenty of things you can do in order to NOT fail... and that is.. following the advice of others who have failed, maybe still failing, and found even some hint of successes.
His website deserves a visit and a few reads.. just randomly choose some articles with good headlines: https://justinjackson.ca
He'll pull you right in. Sounds like a great guy who is just trying to make his own living to support his family while creating financial freedom away from the mundane workplace, while also helping others.
Still much work to be done, but feel free to check it out: https://twitter.com/lemiffe/lists/tophackers/members
* cool blog articles: https://bost.ocks.org/mike/
* Beautiful dataviz and tips on twitter: https://twitter.com/mbostock
* github: https://github.com/mbostock/
* Tantek Çelik -> http://tantek.com and https://indieweb.org
* Aaron Parecki -> https://aaronparecki.com and https://indieweb.org
* Patrick (patio11) McKenzie -> http://www.kalzumeus.com
* Moxie Marlinspike -> https://moxie.org
* Scott Hanselman -> http://www.hanselman.com
* Joel Spolsky -> https://www.joelonsoftware.com
* Jeff Atwood -> https://blog.codinghorror.com
* Gina Trapani -> http://ginatrapani.org
* Matthew Hodgson -> http://matrix.org and https://riot.im
* Armin Ronacher -> http://lucumr.pocoo.org
* Jeffrey Zeldman -> http://www.zeldman.com
* Eric Meyer -> http://meyerweb.com
1. Jeremy Ashkenas - https://github.com/jashkenas
2. Nathan Faucett - https://github.com/nathanfaucett
There are others that are really good from a technical skill/functional standpoint, (https://github.com/jdalton, https://github.com/jeresig, https://github.com/douglascrockford) but I personally don't find their code as aesthetically pleasing i.e. Resig's love of the terniary statement.
For JavaScript (particularly the language changes): Brendan Eich and Dominic Denicola
Also, Maciej Ceglowski [twitter.com/pinboard]. His twitter is hilarious, even though I don't personally subscribe to his service.
Fabrice Bellard: http://www.bellard.org
D. Richard Hipp (SQLite, Fossil) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._Richard_Hipp
Guido van Rossum (Python)
Any of the FreeBSD folk. Same goes for the PostgreSQL lot too - I just like their way of doing things in a calm, collected and efficient manner. Well, at least compared to some other dev teams I've seen :)
Donald Knuth of course.
The guy who tried to make Objective-C more Smalltalkish. Uh, Marcel Weiher. Had to look that up.
Bret Victor.
There's more, but that's all I can think of for now.
There are not many ways to follow him (mostly GH [1]), he hardly uses his Twitter [2]. Maybe that's why he's so productive?
The constantly evolving re-frame docs [3] are all you need to follow..
[1] https://github.com/mike-thompson-day8
Perhaps a little off topic because his content is not specifically software, but given some other mentions of hardware and inspiration his videos are lovely to watch after a long day of code reviews. He recently completed a series building a brass skeleton clock and looks to have some more interesting things going on soon for anyone interested in building things other than software.
Dan Luu (danluu.com) Joey Hess (kitenet.net/~joey/) Matthew Garrett (mjg59.dreamwidth.org) Josh Berkus (databasesoup.com) Bunnie Huang (bunniestudios.com) Jessie Frazelle (blog.jessfraz.com)
Plus a ton more that haven't updated in years. But if they ressurect and post again, I'll be on top of it!
2. [Daniel Lemire](http://lemire.me/en/) - comp sci professor who frequently blogs about interesting db/indexing topics
Engineers are supposed to simplify via their expertise and produce something is consistent, elegant and easy to use and maybe even beautiful. That's the achievement, taking something clearly complex and 'taming' it.
There is a ugly trend towards gratuitous complexity. Some seem to revel in it. Is it because of signalling, lack of expertise or hidden fears about becoming redundant and making work?
At least one of the folks mentioned here is responsible for producing by far the most user hostile pieces of software I have ever come upon.
Discourse seems to not only revel in complexity but celebrate it. The objective does not seem to simplify in any way but make everything as complex and convuluted as possible.
The only way to use it is via Docker so you need to know Docker which is itself not a friend of the simplicity line of thought. Then it needs a full dev environment with around 80 packages, 2 databases, around 150 gems most of which need to be compiled and can fail at any time with mysterious messages and while at building possibly the most important software in human history why not just throw in nodejs too. At the end of which I am sure many would have forgotten why they started this exercise in the first place.
It seems this thread mostly lists folks with white sounding names. May be because software development mostly happens in the West.
When I was in college, I actually believed white people were superior because they had faster neurons. Took a while to invalidate that theory out.
- Joe Duffy
- Raymond Chen
- Eric Lippert
I also keep a weather eye on the blogs of mjg59 and (not a developer, but an academic computer scientist) John Regehr.
SolveSpace
risc-v
Rust (and Servo)
Daala
Also, a second for Limor Fried, ladyada of adafruit.
... And some others. Alas, not many open source contributors, because I follow then mostly for their blogs. Most are .NET people, which is my default ecosystem.
I've been following him since YT Instant. Always seems to be involved in some really exciting projects.
-- Derek Sivers: https://sivers.org/
I don't "follow" anyone. When new posts show up on HN, and the like, by certain developers, I'm more likely to click on them.
My pattern is more commonly to be interested in a topic, do a search, and then read a few articles by whomever wrote on the topic.
Jeff Atwood - Coding Horror
Joel Spolsky - StackOverflow
For iOS animations Victor Baro @victorbaro
Wil Shipley https://blog.wilshipley.com/
Yossi Kreinin http://yosefk.com/
All three brilliant, with good sense of humor and having good "vision thing"
