Common business card mistakes - <AUTHOR> http://www.onesock.net/2010/05/14/10-common-business-card-mistakes/

<comment><USER2> The only purpose of a business card isn't to get scanned into a system and stored away in a CRM. Another purpose of a business card is to extend the brief encounter that started the process. A catchy and well designed business card should jump out and be remembered so when the recipient is going through the people he recently met, that card serves as a reminder and hopefully elevates your name above the others.

<comment><USER3> They're also good for writing notes for people, such as a web site to visit or a map or some book title or whatever. And now the recipient has something with your name on it so they can recall where they got some useful info.

I always make sure my cards have plenty of white space and no gloss to impede writing.

<comment><USER4> These reasons seem more than a little bit outdated in the modern age of ubiquitous cell phones, blackberries, and smart phones.

<comment><USER3> I and probably most people I deal with have smart phones, etc., and yet I still find a need to be jotting down something quick.

And the situation is quite different when I am looking to do business with a non-tech person. Things are not always so ubiquitous in different groups of people, "modern age" not withstanding.

And even if you could get the same results using a device, there are business/social reasons to hand someone a note written on your business card.

Some inefficiencies have value. Don't be blind to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you are getting so many business cards that you can't take 5 minutes to type in my address into your precious CRM system, perhaps the connection isn't as strong as I thought it was when I handed you my info.

My business card is not an invitation to spam me.

<comment><USER6> maybe that's a good reason to violate most of these rules, except for those that respect the ordinary card recipient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good lord, why not just rewrite it as "How your business card must be!" and list the specs:

* 14-pt Arial * one datum per line * 1cm margins * white 100-lb card stock * logos acceptable if and only if they do not resemble characters that may be recognized by my OCR software _you inconsiderate asshole_

<comment><USER8> _white 100-lb card stock_

On a sidenote, there are legitimate issues with some colors of business cards...I speak from personal experience. I thought it would be soooooo coooool to have an all black personal business card. I was oh-so-very-wrong. It is nearly impossible to write anything on a black card, not only to add more info (like another phone number) to give to the other person, but also for that other person to jot down things. I know I often like to write about who gave me the card to help me remember later on - twitter/irc names if it's not on their card, where I met them and when, and so on...black doesn't work so well for that. And I almost never write on my own card, so I never really thought about it.

Reordering business cards soon, and I'm definitely skipping the all black this time around.

<comment><USER9> I like mine black on front, white on back. That way there is a surface you can write stuff on.

<comment><USER8> As long as it's not all black, half colors/mixed colors should be fine for most uses, no? Mine had a small stripe of a different color on the front that most people used to write anything on, but was otherwise black. Bad idea :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you want people to be able to electronically import your data, why not stick an artful qrcode on your card?

<comment> X-Istence This is exactly what I do on my business cards. Scan in the QR code and you have all of my data in an easy machine readable format that can easily be stored.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not everyone scans cards. Most of these are only issues for people like that author that scan business cards and then destroy them.

That said, it's important to have a blank back you can write on if you need to.

<comment><USER11> In non-Roman-alphabet countries, it's quite common to have two-sided business cards with English on one side and the local language on the other.

<comment><USER12> Which is terrible. If you really need business cards in two languages, just order two different sets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _"... Because we (people I met) don't have standards and simple process for exchanging information electronically, business cards are still critically important. ..."_

Today most people I know their twitter address is sufficient. As for business cards, I've never worked in a situation where I've needed or been given them. I do however give away half size Moo cards ~ [http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157616147825654...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157616147825654/) Each card has a unique photo & I get people to choose some they like.

Makes for a good conversation point as @brolewis mentions.

</comment><comment><USER14> How many people actually scan business cards? I may be a hacker, but most of my business contacts are not. My cards are optimized for them, not for me.

</comment><comment><USER15> If you want to make your own business cards with a QR code here is a QR code business card site: www.b2vcard.com it lets you upload your own art or you can use one of the templates. best of all it creates your QR code from your profile so if something changes you can update your profile for free and your QR code on your old cards scan your new info!

</comment><comment><USER16> His no. 10 is wrong. That's a perfectly valid, and, in fact, the expected way to print phonenumbers in systems that has a long-distance selector. It's his scanner-software that isn't up for the job.

The rest of his points are mostly valid, and examples of sacrificing usefulness over artfulness.

<comment><USER17> May be perfectly valid, but many people don't know how to handle the 0 if they rarely make international phone calls. I agree with the article's authors on this point, albeit not for OCR reasons - if you've got an international phone nr on your card, leave out the 0, so that people only have to type what's actually on the card and don't have to think about archaic implementation details of phone systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Title needs to tell people what sort of a relationship they're going to have with you, and who you are.

A common mistake is with selecting an overblown "corporate" title when you're tiny.

For instance I'd suggest "Founder" rather than "CEO" - speaking from personal experience here:

When I started my first business in the late 90's I listed my title as "General Partner" (it was an LLC, made sense to me) and had more than a few people raise eyebrows, smile knowingly at the amateur hour that had just handed them a card.

My other favorite ambiguous but accurate title that's not overblown is "Business Development" . . .</comment>


How I hacked a gmail account - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tawrahim/how-i-hacked-a-gmail-account-56f982f306b4#.ryqoob1u6 <comment><USER2> > After my first attempt, Google asked me to provide them with my phone number > so that they could send me a security code to login.

What? Like any number? _His_ number? Google doesn't even verify if it's the Gmail owner's phone number? This can't be right.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, I think the title is probably incognito click bait for this guy's app. I find little value in this article.

<comment><AUTHOR> @Author here - value is that don't commit sensitive data like email and password into your public github repo. Consider using an ENV variable

<comment><USER3> You didn't address the comment above this. What phone number did you use?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That same search he did gives

"We could not perform this search

Must include at least one user, organization, or repository"

Is this guy lying?

<comment><AUTHOR> To the left, click on code and you are going to see all the results

<comment><USER4> I was in "best match" in the filters, my bad</comment></comment></comment>


Gym Class Is So Bad, Kids Are Skipping School to Avoid It - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/01/why-pe-is-terrible/581467/ <comment><USER2> Can we all agree that this isn't a new phenomenon? It happened all the time in the past, just nobody cared, or maybe the HS football team was more important and you had to find a place for the football coach(es) to teach to get them enough money.

Just like "social studies" being a very weak version of US history, PE exists just to satisfy traditionalists.

</comment><comment><USER3> A laboratory for hazing and the crushing of adolescent self-esteem in general.

I took many "sick" days because of it, and a close friend eventually dropped out of H.S. due to a variety of factors, including regular abuse during so- called P.E.</comment>


Should You Use a Credit Card to Finance Your Startup? - <AUTHOR> http://www.employeeevolution.com/archives/2008/04/11/should-you-use-a-credit-card-to-finance-your-startup/

<comment><USER2> No, no no no! Not even if it is at 0% interest. I've done this, I'm still paying it off, don't do it.

<comment><USER3> _Not even if it is at 0% interest_

Yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very interesting to read the responses here. They aren't at all what I expected to see on this particular site.

I personally know two very successful 'exited' entrepreneurs that would never have had their companies acquired if they didn't rack-up an insane amount of bonus miles on those early startup credit cards.

My belief is that if you _absolutely_ believe in your startup, you should be willing to get essential funds anywhere legal on reasonable terms, especially if the amounts are in the magnitude of $25,000-30k of debt. Clearly you shouldn't _start_ borrowing on credit cards, but doing some financing on the credit card when things are tight and failure is the only alternative... It's a no brainer to me, and it's part of the reason I've stayed out of debt my entire life, so that I have that extra flexibility if it is ever needed.

$25,000 in equity early on is going to cost you a lot more down the line, if you truly believe your startup will be successful.

I think it's great to hear people who have learned so solidly not to use credit cards. But when the chips are down, what is an entrepreneur but someone who takes calculated risks for things they believe in?

Do what you must to keep your dream alive. If it can't succeed, quit, but if it _can_ and _should_ succeed, a successful entrepreneur will do what they need to do to make it happen. There isn't a "no" or "never" in that equation.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There are so many other ways to finance a start-up, that this should probably be the LAST option...and it's so high-risk that if you can't get money another way, you might want to wait until a better idea comes along that you can get someone to finance.

</comment><comment><USER5> imo, no, unless you're doing the 0% APR across credit cards dance. there are just too many other, cheaper ways of getting a little bit of money.

</comment><comment><USER6> We do a ton of stuff on our credit cards, but really only to scale an already profitable campaign.</comment>


Being a web generalist - <AUTHOR> http://generalist.io/a-generalist

<comment><USER2> I too am a generalist. The longer way of saying it is that I like to solve all of the problems and want complete control.

Nice article!

</comment><comment><USER3> One should strive to be a jack of all trades and king of some.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd been used to working all areas of the stack and recently took a 'front- end' position, I'm finding the focus a bit limiting.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been web generalizing since ~1995.

I'd say it's becoming much harder to maintain something close to the forefront of knowledge in all areas (ie. generalise).

Once upon a time every HTML tag and every browser quirk, was something you could remember. Javascript was a toy. People still did ecommerce without HTTPS. We still wrote tags in <CAPS>. We _wrote_ tags instead of generating them.

At least one good thing happened in all this time: the death of flash.

But now we have serious scripting, DOM manipulation, SVG, canvas, 24x7x365 uptime targets, redundancy and scaling. Sophisticated attackers. DDoS. Increasing layers of bullshit hoops just for functional email. Global reach - multilingual, multi-directional text that varies so much in shape and form you can't easily use a single stylesheet or layout for. Instant messaging and social networks. The internet's logical geography of access latencies. Adaptive GeoDNS responses. Combine that with mobile, now the globally dominant internet access methodology, which has made deployment a _lot_ more difficult, particularly if you really need to hit all platforms, unify code and styling across your app and web experience, and you want to hook native features otherwise unavailable. There are possible pipelines, sure, but it's far from trivial to hit _all_ platforms, hit them well, maintain control and testing. Payments is still a pain in the ass, if you want to support a few locales, and/or small payments and/or real time digital service provision (impossibly expensive with cards due to chargeback risk).

So, my fellow renaissance peeps, I must confess: I saw the title and thought this post was going to sound the death of the web generalist.

As it stands, it's more an assertive statement of "don't lock me in an organizational box", which remains very intelligent, but perhaps doesn't really reveal much otherwise. (Though HR people should get with the program!)

<comment><AUTHOR> When I was writing this I felt much of the same sentiment however I came to a different conclusion.

I feel that generalists now more than ever can aggregate a set of skills necessary to make an impact on the web. Most of these languages, frameworks, tools, shifts in thought are attempts to simplify the complexity.

I remember seeing the 15 minute rails blog when I was 16 and thinking how insane that was. I can't imagine how it must have felt for folks that worked in the industry during the 90's when it cost millions just to get a site up and running.

Couple these tools with the abundance of knowledge online and I'd say the age of the renaissance man is alive and well.

<comment><USER5> _the age of the renaissance man is alive and well._

Well argued, though I would say only in flatter organizations or in very specific cases. Conventional management structures kill off breadth of thinking very effectively.</comment></comment></comment>


Apollo 13 – Apollo in Real Time - <AUTHOR> https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/ <comment><USER2> This is just superb. Anyone who was old enough to follow the later Apollo missions while they were growing up should get a kick out of this.</comment>


Previously Unknown Warhol Works Discovered on Floppy Disks from 1985 (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://studioforcreativeinquiry.org/events/warhol-discovery <comment><USER2> I define myself as a former Amiga owner. That computer was so defining and the community so strong sad that Jack Tramiel went out to kill the Amiga with the Atari ST. These Andy Warhol pictures were a claim to fame for many Amiga owners and it was awesome to know that they were found right next to the bouncing red and white ball.

It must have taken around 6 or 7 years for the Macintosh and "IBM PC" computers to catch up. The graphic art capacity was head and shoulders about anything else outside of Silicone Graphics. Not to mention that VIM was developed on the Amiga.

I had a audio port so I could record through RCA cables and remix things. My church had the Video Toaster which was in use from 1987 to 2004. This actually led to me doing a lot of audio and video work that I still do today.

In the future I think the hardware architecture will resemble more of the Amiga as we hit the limits of computer chips. There will be more dedicated chips and cores for more specific things.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure. Heterogeneous architectures were a huge mess with the PS3, for a recent example, and abandoned in the subsequent PS4 for relatively standard x86 kit. Taking advantage of specialized hardware is not without its costs.

<comment><USER4> It depends on the API implementation, really. The criticism back in the day was that Cell was difficult to program for. I would imagine this was because its functions were at a lower level, which buys you power at increased development cost. Think the difference between Vulkan and OpenGL. Sony didn't seem to value development value over capability, which led to the PS3 earning the reputation of being an underutilised console: [https://www.cnet.com/news/sony-ps3-is-hard-to-develop-for- on...](https://www.cnet.com/news/sony-ps3-is-hard-to-develop-for-on-purpose/)

Apple's heterogenous computing functions on iOS are higher-level and much easier to use. Instead of manually writing code to do FaceID on iOS, possibly involving graduate-degree levels of theory, you simply create a biometry type which abstracts much of the details, many of which developers aren't particularly interested in fine-tuning. This is how someone on a budget like Bank XYZ can use FaceID to unlock your bank app.

<comment><USER5> Another angle worth considering is the economics of porting titles. If you take full advantage of specialized hardware like the PS3 had, it could have a strong influence on the implementation of games- possibly even pushing down to choices in aesthetics and game mechanics. As a result it may be very difficult to get a comparable experience on another console.

If a game is designed and written to more-or-less cater to a common denominator it is more straightforward to later port the game to other consoles or PCs- including platforms that might not exist at the time the original game was created- and mop up sales from those other userbases.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure I agree. It was much easier to develop your game around the PS3's heterogeneous architecture, then port it to a more conventional architecture like the Xbox 360 or PC and get good performance than doing it the other way around.

<comment><USER5> In very broad strokes, compared to the other consoles of its generation, the PS3 offered a large compute capacity via SPEs and was starved for RAM and memory bandwidth. I think you're conflating the technical impact of a heterogenous architecture with other differences in specs.

If you tailored a game to work within the memory footprint of a PS3 and did not take advantage of SPEs, a port is easy- you've aimed at a lowest common denominator. If you designed your game with the expectation that you'd have more RAM, you'll have to make some painful decisions to cut the game down to size. If you designed your game to actually take advantage of SPEs, there wouldn't necessarily be a comparable compute resource on the platform to which you would like to port.

<comment><USER7> Just a small nit that the PS3 and X360 had the same amount of RAM, it was just split on the PS3. X360 had a unified memory model which was a lot easier(PS3's is closer to a PC and X360 your mobile phone).

We still did clever things like putting music in GPU memory and then streaming it back to system memory since the bandwidth wasn't large and read patterns were very predictable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've got a few Amigas and my 6 year old son loves messing about in Deluxe Paint. Some of his creations are starting to approach Warhol's level... I think...

</comment><comment><USER9> >Reviewing the disks' directory listings, the team's initial excitement on seeing promising filenames like "campbells.pic" and "marilyn1.pic" quickly turned to dismay, when it emerged that the files were stored in a completely unknown file format,

I wonder what format it was...

<comment><USER10> They don't really say very much. The Venus bitmap was a demo picture that shipped with Deluxe Paint (and the one they've published seems to be blank where the header/toolbox would be), and although they credited it to Warhol it doesn't appear he's done much than cut/paste a third eye in.

If these were system disks from a prototype Amiga, then it makes sense that these pictures came from an early version of Deluxe Paint, and that .pic was some intermediate / temporary / memory-dump type format before they adopted the .iff system.

Given the Amiga was quite different display-wise, a description of the file format would probably be quite instructive in terms of whether it was an Amiga-native data structure or something already existent somehow.

<comment><USER11> _> it doesn't appear he's done much than cut/paste a third eye in._

To be fair, that third eye changes the picture in a very significant way, in artistic terms. Art is not about quantity of effort.

<comment><USER12> I mean, it can be. Just might not be tangible effort. Thought, planning is effort. Banksy, for a beaten to death example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Really crazy. The first one gives off a strong vaporwave vibe. Really weird how that works out.

<comment><USER14> Art made in 1985 looks like art made today that is made to look like it was made in 1985 - shocking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The PDF report gives some fascinating technical detail, linked in the article and at [http://studioforcreativeinquiry.org/public/warhol_amiga_repo...](http://studioforcreativeinquiry.org/public/warhol_amiga_report_v10.pdf)

</comment><comment> yann-gael This is silly: lots of Amiga computers are still around, the Amiga community knew about these images for years. They didn't do due diligence and studied previous/related/existing works.

<comment><USER16> The artist who "rediscovered" them is a notorious self-promoter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The Venus image was one of the ones bundled with Deluxe Paint, Just seems he's duplicated the eye. Feels we might be attributing a mistake as a conscious piece of art.

<comment><USER18> So it's a remix. What was that about good artists steal?

<comment><USER19> It's a remix with a single cut and paste.

<comment><USER20> This is an artist who signed soup cans. I'm sure he'd tell you something like there is no difference between accident and art when done by an artist.

<comment><USER21> This is one way to view artist - not as a craftman, but as a brand like Walt Disney (or Merceded Benz). The artist then functions as a curator for all the data that passes through him and signs those articles he considers worthy of the brand. This is a totally fine way to look at it - just as long as he/she does not tread on someones copyright.

<comment><USER11> _> not as a craftman, but as a brand_

That's reductionist. Warhol's craft was in recognising and willfully exploiting brand culture. He described the celebrity culture we now live with, and made a job out of being the one who understood how it worked. He wasn't just signing "worthy" stuff; he was showing people how the _mechanisms_ of brand-building and celebrity culture actually work: by repetition and labelling/signing/appropriating. He branded the brands like brands branded the world, and he did it over and over with minor variations, exactly like they do.

He was not without his flaws, but he wasn't just some sort of "gatekeeper of cool". He obviously didn't think an artist exists to validate this or that brand; the validation was a side-effect of his artistic craft. This is why trying to "play Warhol" today, using different brands or imagery, is just stupid, in artistic terms: he's done it already, it's all there already and there is nothing else to say on that particular subject.

<comment><USER22> Refreshing to see enlightened critical theory on HN. I don't agree that there is "nothing else to say" about it however. The world is constantly changing and often presents old ideas in new and interesting contexts.

<comment><USER11> I agree, I was a bit flippant there, sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Part of CMOA's wonderful Invisible Photo doc:

[http://www.nowseethis.org/invisiblephoto](http://www.nowseethis.org/invisiblephoto)

Amiga games are so important to the history of game development and design. Could the brand could be resurrected if willing investors were to arise?

Amiga Documents:

[https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/](https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/)

<comment><USER24> Here's a direct link to Part 2 on Vimeo, featuring the Warhol story: [https://vimeo.com/92583299](https://vimeo.com/92583299)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wish they'd just release the raw disk images themselves. It's said Warhol used a prototype Amiga, and thus a prototype version of pre-1.0 Kickstart (earlier than rev 27.5, which is publicly floating around and which has no Workbench).

</comment><comment><USER26> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7638904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7638904)

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder what the "plan for reading the disks with a cart of exotic gear" actually entailed...

</comment><comment><USER28> So where is my sceptical top hacker news comment saying something negative about theese images?

</comment><comment><USER29> I sense fraud.

<comment><USER30> I'm not sure actually, i have my own doubts but I have to admit the entire absence of artistic talent makes suspect it might actually be legit!</comment></comment>


Compiling C to printable x86, to make an executable research paper [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA_DrBwkiJA <comment><USER2> Did not expect to get rickrolled while learning about assembly…

</comment><comment><USER3> Damn. No mov (no movfuscator approach), and no interrupts. And only jumping forwards, so no loops, they have to be unfolded in the compiler.

This is awesome.

<comment> loup-vaillant Actually, there are loops: jumps are performed modulo 2^16, so jumping past the end of the program actually wraps back to the beginning. By dividing the program into blocks, and jump as many times as required, you can perform loops. Just one problem: it takes a _looong_ time.

<comment><USER4> Movfuscator is comparably just as slow or worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Totally recommend Dr. Tom PhD. Made a great video on automatically making NES games 3D.

</comment><comment><USER6> The brown paper and explanations reminded me of a Numberphile video (another good channel to check out on YouTube). I'm very impressed out how he was able to break down what he did and explain it simply.

<comment><AUTHOR> Likewise; that impressed me just as much as the details themselves did. An explanation that clear is a rare thing.

I actually appreciated the degree to which he glossed over certain things. For instance, he described a register as a temporary thing inside the processor, and then described the stack the same way. For the purposes of the explanation he gave, it doesn't _matter_ that the stack actually lives in memory. And anyone who already knows about the stack will already know that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder why he implemented a | b as (a & b) - ((a ^ b ^ -1) + 1) instead of (a & b) ^ a ^ b which seems much easier.

<comment><USER8> He acknowledged this in the comments and said that he didn't notice! But also that using add demonstrated the point he was making much better: decompose an inaccessible desired instruction into a longer series of accessible instructions. I agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That was amazing.

</comment><comment><USER10> tom7 is a crazy man :D</comment>


New Year's Resolution: How to make a new start by deleting all Facebook posts - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/article/3017794/mobile-wireless/how-to-delete-all-facebook-posts-photos.html <comment><AUTHOR> Facebook posts can be a liability. They don't age well especially if you've written something risque or insulting or posted a compromising photo or video of yourself. People have been sued, lost their jobs and had their lives ruined by what they thought at the time was a harmless Facebook post.

With a New Years resolution to post safely, you can give yourself a fresh start by deleting all your old posts and relax.</comment>


How we use feature-switching at FreeAgent - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.freeagent.com/2012/09/04/switching-wings-mid-flight/

<comment><USER2> What happens when the new feature relies on a different version of the database schema?

<comment><USER3> We make sure that the code works with and without the migration. Or you can flip a feature switch as part of the migration.</comment></comment>


Samsung: "Apple couldn't have sold a single iPhone without us" - <AUTHOR> http://www.uswitch.com/mobiles/news/2012/07/apple_couldn_t_have_sold_single_iphone_without_samsung/

<comment><USER2> I'm bored now. Can't we talk about Motorola or Mars or Google Sponge or interesting things?</comment>


Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow? - <AUTHOR> The one thing that keeps me inspired, more than anything, is following up with the activities of people whom I consider as masters.
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. <comment><USER6> None of them. There are lots that I respect and admire, and there are lots that I think provide a great value to our community. But I don't "follow" them for a few reasons: (1) it takes time, which I don't have, (2) I don't like buying into a cult of personality, no matter how benevolent and (3) I don't derive much value from that and would rather spend that time/energy on creating my own thing.

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.

<comment><USER7> > (2) I don't like buying into a cult of personality, no matter how benevolent

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.

<comment><USER6> I suppose I prefer to consume my personal developer blog posts filtered through something like HN. It ends up being fairly high quality without worrying if I'm following enough people or the correct people.

<comment><USER8> I understand what you're saying, some people follow a popular developer and that can cause them to take what they say and regurgitate it with an annoying arrogance.

But supposing everybody took your stance we wouldn't be able to have something like Hacker News. I think following popular developers and sharing what you believe to be good content may not be enjoyable all the time, but I do think it's necessary. Just as someone who has only been in the software culture for about two years now.

<comment><USER6> You are right. Someone has to do it. I suppose I just don't want to be me :-p

<comment><USER9> They call me the wanderer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some amazing non-male developers:

— Jen Simmons: [http://labs.jensimmons.com/](http://labs.jensimmons.com/)

— Julia Evans: [https://jvns.ca/](https://jvns.ca/)

— Lea Verou: [http://lea.verou.me/](http://lea.verou.me/)

— Mina Markham: [http://mina.codes/](http://mina.codes/)

— Sara Soueidan: [https://sarasoueidan.com/articles/](https://sarasoueidan.com/articles/)

— Sarah Mei: [http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/](http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/)

— Ana Tudor: [https://thebabydino.github.io/](https://thebabydino.github.io/)

— Anna Debenham: [http://www.maban.co.uk/](http://www.maban.co.uk/)

<comment><USER11> _> non-male_

In what way are the genitals of a programming blog author relevant?

<comment><USER12> I had the same reaction.

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.

<comment><USER13> While the person writing the post pointed it out, only one of the blogs seemed to be about her gender* while the others didn't even mention it as far as I saw.

* [http://mina.codes/#](http://mina.codes/#) (extremely so, if I may add)

<comment><USER12> Of course, I was talking about the fact that, this comment is the second on this thread and that many women act this way.

The best programming girls are usually the ones that don't waste their time with this representation of their gender.

<comment><USER14> Wow.

I'll bet some of them talk about gender/feminism/discrimination/etc because of men still calling them "girls".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Julia Evans : [https://jvns.ca](https://jvns.ca)

Rachel : [https://rachelbythebay.com/w/](https://rachelbythebay.com/w/)

Jeff Atwood : [https://blog.codinghorror.com/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/)

Joel Spolsky : [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/)

Dan Luu : [https://danluu.com/](https://danluu.com/)

patio11 : [http://www.kalzumeus.com/](http://www.kalzumeus.com/)

<comment><USER16> While he has many an interesting read on SEO and business related topics in the field of software, what programming related content from patio11 are you referring to?

<comment><USER15> He does not write programming related blogs often, but there are some if you go to the archive (most are published before 2012) [http://www.kalzumeus.com/archive/](http://www.kalzumeus.com/archive/)

Recently he talked about building Stockfighter :

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/10/30/developing-in- stockfight...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/10/30/developing-in-stockfighter- with-no-trading-experience/)

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/08/20/designing-and- building-s...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/08/20/designing-and-building- stockfighter-our-programming-game/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Brad Fitzpatrick - [https://bradfitz.com/](https://bradfitz.com/) \- Started and sold LiveJournal, wrote memcached, works on Golang at Google now. Always enjoy his talks on YouTube. My favorite part is that he doesn't come off as super serious so I find subtle humor in his delivery.

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.

<comment><USER18> He's also spearheaded Camlistore, which is intended to be a archival system for electronic data. Interesting both technically, and for the problem it attempts to solve.

[https://camlistore.org/](https://camlistore.org/)

<comment><USER19> For a second there I got excited because I thought it might be written in OCaml :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Beware of putting people on pedestals. Far better is to just follow people who do cool stuff. They don't have to be a "master" to do something cool that will inspire you.

<comment><USER21> My introduction to the world of professional software development was meeting one of the idols and hanging out with him for two days before realizing who he was. We've kept in touch since then and I now consider him one of my best friends.

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.

<comment><USER22> > 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.

<comment><USER23> >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.

Odd choice of words, wouldn't it make more sense to switch the meaning of 'talented' and 'gifted'? A 'gift' is something you receive without sacrifice, while a 'talent' needs to be honed.

<comment><USER22> Talent is innate.

Skill is practiced.

If you're passionate enough about something that you happen to have a natural affinity for in order to hone your skills, I call that a gift.

<comment><USER24> Not a native speaker but I also find that odd: I always thought talented referred to the parable about the servants who were given talents, and as such I would expect that talented and gifted would be almost the same.

<comment><USER25> I assume you are referring to Jesus' "parable of the talents". If so, it is dealing with money, not skills. [https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talent_(weight)](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talent_\(weight\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> For Android dev related, I follow

Jake Wharton : [https://github.com/jakewharton](https://github.com/jakewharton) , [https://twitter.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/](https://commonsware.com/blog/)

Chris Banes - [https://chris.banes.me/](https://chris.banes.me/)

Cyril Mottier - [https://cyrilmottier.com](https://cyrilmottier.com) , [https://twitter.com/cyrilmottier](https://twitter.com/cyrilmottier)

Dan Lew - [http://blog.danlew.net/](http://blog.danlew.net/)

Donn Felker - [http://www.donnfelker.com](http://www.donnfelker.com)

Mark Allison - [https://blog.stylingandroid.com](https://blog.stylingandroid.com)

Jesse Wilson - [https://publicobject.com/](https://publicobject.com/)

Roman Nurik - [https://twitter.com/romannurik](https://twitter.com/romannurik)

<comment><USER27> Thank you for mentioning me. I really appreciate it. I'm always here to help. Please reach out if there is anything I can do to help you in any way. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Jon Blow: A game designer and programmer behind the popular titles "Braid" and "The Witness". He's currently working on making a new programming language and chronicling it on YouTube. \- Twitter: [https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow](https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow) \- YouTube: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCuoqzrsHlwv1YyPKLuMDUQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCuoqzrsHlwv1YyPKLuMDUQ)

<comment><USER29> He's the main one I follow too, although I haven't kept up on his programming language progress (although I should get on that). He gives very interesting lectures though. I had the good fortune to see him give two in person at the Game Developer's Conference in 2008, and that was actually before I knew who he was and before Braid came out. He actually showed a tiny piece of Braid during the lecture, although it didn't hit me how clever it was until it was released and I got to see the whole thing.

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.

<comment><USER30> He did a couple of streams recently using his language to work on a new game.

At the very least it will be C/C++ where you don't have to type () around if expressions. So there is that. :D

<comment><USER29> Cool, I'll definitely check those out. I am looking to start making video games again, although it seems like this is probably in too early of a state still, so I was planning on refreshing my knowledge of Unity. But it doesn't hurt to watch those streams, and I look forward to when it makes sense to do serious development in it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Hardware/microcontroller people write code to do interesting things. Sometimes the code isn't as interesting as the whole system or application but you get lured in anyway. The miracle of the adafruit magnetometer driver or MQTT client isn't in the elegance of the code (although its not awful) its that it exists at all and it works. Anyway presented in no order:

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.

<comment><USER32> Love your list, here are a few other hardware people that put out great stuff:

\- Charles Lohr [http://cnlohr.net/](http://cnlohr.net/) mixed bag of art and hardware

\- Jeroen Domburg (SpriteTM) of [http://spritesmods.com](http://spritesmods.com) now at Espressif, an adept magician.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> David Nolen - [http://swannodette.github.io/](http://swannodette.github.io/)

James Long - [http://jlongster.com/](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...

<comment><USER34> I mean this in the most respectful way possible: David Nolen has a reached a level of enlightment the French describe as jouissance I will never achieve.

<comment><USER35> What makes you say that?

<comment><USER34> just the way he talks and simplifies FP in a way that previously has been impossible to achieve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> * Feross Aboukhadijeh ([https://github.com/feross](https://github.com/feross))

* James Halliday ([https://github.com/substack](https://github.com/substack))

* Paul Irish ([https://github.com/paulirish](https://github.com/paulirish))

* Addy Osmani ([https://github.com/addyosmani](https://github.com/addyosmani))

* Tim Abbott ([https://github.com/timabbott](https://github.com/timabbott))

* Zach Holman ([https://github.com/holman](https://github.com/holman))

* Jessica McKellar ([https://github.com/jesstess](https://github.com/jesstess))

* TJ Holowaychuk ([https://github.com/tj](https://github.com/tj))

* Jeremy Ashkenas ([https://github.com/jashkenas](https://github.com/jashkenas))

* David Heinemeier Hanson ([https://github.com/dhh](https://github.com/dhh))

* Juan Benet ([https://github.com/jbenet](https://github.com/jbenet))

* Guillermo Rauch ([https://github.com/rauchg](https://github.com/rauchg))

</comment><comment><USER37> David Beazley : [http://www.dabeaz.com/](http://www.dabeaz.com/)

Kenneth Reitz : [https://www.kennethreitz.org/](https://www.kennethreitz.org/)

Armin Ronacher : [http://lucumr.pocoo.org/](http://lucumr.pocoo.org/)

Julien Danjou : [https://julien.danjou.info/](https://julien.danjou.info/)

Hynek Schlawack : [https://hynek.me/](https://hynek.me/)

Donald Stufft : [https://caremad.io/](https://caremad.io/)

<comment><USER38> found the Python guy

<comment><USER37> How'd you guess?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> My current list:

* Armin Ronacher: Flask, Jinja2, click

* Jonathan Blow: game dev, designing a new low-level language called Jai ([https://www.youtube.com/user/jblow888](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](https://github.com/fogleman))

<comment><USER40> Shoutout to Michael. His tenacity and discipline amazes me. He posts some great stuff on his Twitter: [https://twitter.com/FogleBird](https://twitter.com/FogleBird)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> While i wouldn't say i "follow" them, i have found inspiration from

Stephanie Hurlburt: [https://twitter.com/sehurlburt](https://twitter.com/sehurlburt)

Scott Hanselman: [https://twitter.com/shanselman](https://twitter.com/shanselman)

David Fowler: [https://twitter.com/davidfowl](https://twitter.com/davidfowl)

Frank Krueger: [https://twitter.com/praeclarum](https://twitter.com/praeclarum)

Troy Hunt: [https://twitter.com/troyhunt](https://twitter.com/troyhunt)

Niall Merrigan: [https://twitter.com/nmerrigan](https://twitter.com/nmerrigan)

</comment><comment><USER42> Bret Victor: [http://worrydream.com/](http://worrydream.com/) Gets posted a lot.

Brendan Gregg: [http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/](http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/) Everything Linux Performance.

Rich Hickey/David Nolen Mentioned enough around here.

<comment><USER43> Bret Victor is amazing. I saw his video about the future of programming[0] and have been following him since then.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Fabrice Bellard, [http://www.bellard.org](http://www.bellard.org)

<comment><USER18> Seconded. This developer has an absolutely amazing output and corpus of works.

<comment><USER45> very true. I just wish he gives some video interviews. Just would love to watch such an amazing productive guy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Since you seem to be in the web area:

\- Addy Osmani [https://github.com/addyosmani](https://github.com/addyosmani) \- Paul Irish [https://github.com/paulirish](https://github.com/paulirish) \- Substack [https://github.com/substack](https://github.com/substack) \- Jeff Atwood [https://blog.codinghorror.com/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/)

<comment><USER47> I really like Substack's philosophy of development. It has stuck with me for a long time:

[https://gist.github.com/substack/5075355](https://gist.github.com/substack/5075355)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Mainly scala devs or java performance people:

[https://github.com/Atry](https://github.com/Atry)

[https://github.com/lihaoyi](https://github.com/lihaoyi)

[https://github.com/davegurnell](https://github.com/davegurnell)

[https://github.com/nitsanw](https://github.com/nitsanw)

[https://github.com/mjpt777](https://github.com/mjpt777)

[https://github.com/milessabin](https://github.com/milessabin)

[https://github.com/xeno-by](https://github.com/xeno-by)

[https://github.com/travisbrown](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](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mechanical-sympathy)

</comment><comment><USER49> Ned Batchelder. Blog - [http://nedbatchelder.com/](http://nedbatchelder.com/) Stack Overflow answers - [http://stackoverflow.com/users/14343/ned- batchelder](http://stackoverflow.com/users/14343/ned-batchelder) Coverage.py - [https://github.com/nedbat/coveragepy](https://github.com/nedbat/coveragepy) Twitter - [https://twitter.com/nedbat](https://twitter.com/nedbat)

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.

</comment><comment><USER50> Flattered, but honestly many of us are just well-known because we work in the average domain, where many people happen to be. I don't think people should really look up anything I do that way, there are plenty of far more skilled programmers out there, they're just working on more obscure things haha. There's nothing I do that someone else couldn't easily achieve, just takes some time.

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.

</comment><comment><USER51> All R related:

Hadley Wickham - [https://github.com/hadley](https://github.com/hadley)

Joe Cheng - [https://github.com/jcheng5](https://github.com/jcheng5)

Yihui Xie - [https://github.com/yihui](https://github.com/yihui)

JJ Allaire - [https://github.com/jjallaire](https://github.com/jjallaire)

Dean Attali - [https://github.com/daattali](https://github.com/daattali)

Bob Rudis - [https://github.com/hrbrmstr](https://github.com/hrbrmstr)

Kent Russell - [https://github.com/timelyportfolio](https://github.com/timelyportfolio)

Jeroen Ooms - [https://github.com/jeroenooms](https://github.com/jeroenooms)

</comment><comment><USER52> [https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey- fanclub](https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey-fanclub)

<comment><USER53> Whenever Rich Hickey says something, I listen!

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I would add to this list the late Pieter Hintjens, known for ZeroMQ and many other projects over the years.

[http://hintjens.com/](http://hintjens.com/)

Beyond programming, his writings about society and how it can be explained algorithmically are very interesting to programmers.

</comment><comment><USER55> Jessie Frazelle : [https://blog.jessfraz.com](https://blog.jessfraz.com) \- Funny, culturally aware, and works with a lot of things that are going to be shaping _our_ world. Also, @jessfraz

<comment><USER56> I follow them as well :) Their work with containers, and their general commentary make for fascinating reading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> John Carmack [https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack)

Fabrice Bellard [http://www.bellard.org/](http://www.bellard.org/)

Douglas Crockford [https://github.com/douglascrockford](https://github.com/douglascrockford)

Guillermo Rauch [https://zeit.co/blog](https://zeit.co/blog)

James Halliday [https://github.com/substack](https://github.com/substack)

Terry Cavanagh [http://distractionware.com/blog/](http://distractionware.com/blog/)

Sam Gentle [https://twitter.com/sgentle](https://twitter.com/sgentle)

Caolan McMahon [https://github.com/caolan](https://github.com/caolan)

<comment><USER57> Edit: And Peter Norvig [http://norvig.com/ipython/](http://norvig.com/ipython/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Most guys I follow are either rust or haskell developers.

@manishearth - rust - [https://manishearth.github.io/](https://manishearth.github.io/)

@bitemyapp - writer of haskell: first principles

@bartoszmilewski - haskell - [https://bartoszmilewski.com/](https://bartoszmilewski.com/)

@jdegoes - writes informative FP blog posts - [http://degoes.net/](http://degoes.net/)

@aaron_turon - rust - [https://aturon.github.io/blog/](https://aturon.github.io/blog/)

@pcwalton - <USER3>

@nikomatsakis - rust - [http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/](http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/)

@paf31 - purescript creator

@nick_r_cameron - <USER3>

@kmett - famous haskeller

@steveklabnik - rust - [http://words.steveklabnik.com/](http://words.steveklabnik.com/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Some interesting mentions here. I tend to follow mostly people who talk about statically-typed functional programming. Some people who I believe stand out because they changed the game in some way:

* 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.

</comment><comment><USER59> Scott Hanselman. If you are a Microsoft / .NET developer he is probably at the top of your list. Pragmatic, fun, quality blog posts and produces really good podcasts.

[http://www.hanselman.com/](http://www.hanselman.com/)

<comment><USER60> Scott's blog is one of my favourites. Even when it's not .NET related, it's always entertaining.

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).

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Sebastian Lague: [https://twitter.com/SebastianLague](https://twitter.com/SebastianLague)

Tim Sweeney: [https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic](https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic)

John Carmack: [https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack)

Macy Kuang: [https://twitter.com/MacyKuang](https://twitter.com/MacyKuang)

Jeri Ellsworth: [https://twitter.com/jeriellsworth](https://twitter.com/jeriellsworth)

Ryan Speets: [https://twitter.com/RyanSpeets](https://twitter.com/RyanSpeets)

Harvey Ball: [https://twitter.com/The_StoneFox](https://twitter.com/The_StoneFox)

</comment><comment><USER62> Fabien Sanglard knows how to do code reviews of old games in such a way that I feel like I understand what he wrote. Until I close the tab, of course.

[http://fabiensanglard.net/](http://fabiensanglard.net/)

</comment><comment> sakura-rb I'm a Ruby user, these are my inspiration

* Yehuda Katz - [https://twitter.com/wycats](https://twitter.com/wycats)

* Steve Klabnik - [https://twitter.com/steveklabnik](https://twitter.com/steveklabnik)

* Aaron Patterson - [https://twitter.com/tenderlove](https://twitter.com/tenderlove)

* Charles Nutter - [https://twitter.com/headius](https://twitter.com/headius)

</comment><comment><USER63> Troll picks:

Curtis Yarvin a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin))

Xah Lee ([http://xahlee.org/](http://xahlee.org/))

Michael O'Church ([https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/](https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/))

Bryan Edds ([https://medium.com/@bryanedds](https://medium.com/@bryanedds))

CAT-V ([http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/](http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/))

Suckless ([http://suckless.org/philosophy](http://suckless.org/philosophy))

<comment><USER64> This will either be my most highly upvoted post ever or will get me hellbanned, but that MOC blog has got to be some of the most aggrandizing, self-obsessed nonsense I have ever read. It's like he's living in his own fantasy world where he is simultaneously the smartest person on Earth and incredibly oppressed.

The idea that someone is going through life thinking that way is more than a little depressing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> John Carmack

[https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack](https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack)

</comment><comment><USER66> Bryan Cantrill.

[http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/](http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/)

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/](http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/)

If I could import someones brain to my own, it would be his.

Kyle Fuller

[https://github.com/kylef](https://github.com/kylef)

Guy is like a UNIX programmer for the modern age.

</comment><comment><USER67> Raymond Hettinger - [https://twitter.com/raymondh](https://twitter.com/raymondh)

David Beazley - [https://twitter.com/dabeaz](https://twitter.com/dabeaz)

Kenneth Reitz - [https://github.com/kennethreitz](https://github.com/kennethreitz)

</comment><comment><USER68> I recommend following Donald Knuth, the late Richard Stevens, Brian Kernighan, Douglas Comer, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, and many others I can't think of at the moment. By "follow" I mean read their books.

</comment><comment><USER69> Peter Norvig. [http://norvig.com](http://norvig.com)

</comment><comment><USER70> Windytan (Oona Räisänen):

[http://www.windytan.com/](http://www.windytan.com/)

[https://twitter.com/windyoona](https://twitter.com/windyoona)

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.

</comment><comment><USER71> Marco Arment, of tumblr, instapaper, Overcast, and ATP: [https://marco.org/](https://marco.org/), [https://twitter.com/marcoarment](https://twitter.com/marcoarment)

Gary Bernhardt, of wat: [https://github.com/garybernhardt](https://github.com/garybernhardt), [https://twitter.com/garybernhardt](https://twitter.com/garybernhardt)

<comment><USER72> You actually mean Gary Bernhardt of Destroy All Software [https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts)

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Scott Hanselman(dotnet and random h/w hacks) -[http://www.hanselman.com/](http://www.hanselman.com/)

Rob Connery(dotnet,elixir,postgres) - [http://rob.conery.io/](http://rob.conery.io/)

</comment><comment><USER74> David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO of Basecamp and Creator of Ruby on Rails [https://www.twitter.com/dhh](https://www.twitter.com/dhh)

</comment><comment><USER75> Dan Luu: [http://danluu.com/](http://danluu.com/)

</comment><comment><USER76> I follow the legendary Jeff Vroom [1] and his stratacode project [2]. I was lucky enough to work with Jeff in the 90s, when he was architect of the AVS/Express visualisation system. He went on to Art Technology Group, then Adobe, and is now independent. AVS/Express had the best visual programming system I've ever used, and was way ahead of its time.

[1] [https://github.com/jeffvroom](https://github.com/jeffvroom) [2] [https://github.com/stratacode](https://github.com/stratacode)

</comment><comment><USER77> Sean Griffin, going forward (recent discovery).

He's a member of both Rails and Rust teams; works on database stuff for both ([https://diesel.rs](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](http://bikeshed.fm)

Github: [https://github.com/sgrif](https://github.com/sgrif)

</comment><comment><USER78> Rachel: [https://rachelbythebay.com/w/](https://rachelbythebay.com/w/)

Kyle Kingsbury, for his Jepsen series: [https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen](https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen)

</comment><comment><USER79> [Nick Craver]([http://nickcraver.com/](http://nickcraver.com/)) and on twitter [@Nick_Craver]([https://twitter.com/Nick_Craver](https://twitter.com/Nick_Craver))

</comment><comment><USER80> I know you didn't ask for books but here are some interesting ones. The first two cover individuals and the last two cover the works of others.

Coders At Work ([https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft- Program...](https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft- Programming/dp/1430219483/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485784938&sr=1-1&keywords=coders+at+work))

Founders At Work ([https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups- Early/...](https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups- Early/dp/1430210788/ref=pd_sim_14_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1430210788&pd_rd_r=PRQTYC41ZVNCDJBEQW7X&pd_rd_w=4Mwie&pd_rd_wg=QQobP&psc=1&refRID=PRQTYC41ZVNCDJBEQW7X))

Architecture of Open Source Systems ([https://www.amazon.com/Architecture- Open-Source-Applications...](https://www.amazon.com/Architecture-Open-Source- Applications/dp/1257638017/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485785082&sr=1-1&keywords=architecture+of+open+source+applications))

Architecture of Open Source Systems - Vol 2 ([https://www.amazon.com/Architecture-Open-Source- Applications...](https://www.amazon.com/Architecture-Open-Source-Applications- Ii/dp/1105571815/ref=pd_bxgy_14_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1105571815&pd_rd_r=BPJWPGEYPSN1MF9E9JHF&pd_rd_w=dc1Ss&pd_rd_wg=PNQE2&psc=1&refRID=BPJWPGEYPSN1MF9E9JHF))

</comment><comment><USER81> Some names from memory:

\- 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)

</comment><comment><USER82> Oleg Kiselyov on functional programming [http://okmij.org/ftp/](http://okmij.org/ftp/)

</comment><comment><USER83> Casey Muratori: [https://mollyrocket.com/casey/](https://mollyrocket.com/casey/)

</comment><comment><USER84> I hadn't seen links to these guys.

Martin Fowler - [https://www.martinfowler.com/](https://www.martinfowler.com/)

Rober C. Martin (Uncle Bob) - [https://sites.google.com/site/unclebobconsultingllc/](https://sites.google.com/site/unclebobconsultingllc/)

</comment><comment><USER85> Excellent list of devs already. I would add:

Tess Ferrandez: [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/tess/](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/tess/) (Fantastic analysis of Windows debugging internals)

John Gruber: [http://daringfireball.net/](http://daringfireball.net/)

<comment><USER86> ++1 for Tess Ferrandez and her debugging labs. As an engineer for a web hoster I found these invaluable for tracking down why, with no knowledge of their codebase, customer worker processes on IIS would suddenly die, hang or go 100% CPU.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Dr. Axel Rauschmayer : [http://www.2ality.com/](http://www.2ality.com/)

</comment><comment><USER88> This is fun. Here's mine:

\- Brad fitzpatrick -- [http://bradfitz.com/](http://bradfitz.com/)

\- Julia Evans -- [https://jvns.ca](https://jvns.ca)

\- Raymond Hettinger -- [https://rhettinger.wordpress.com/](https://rhettinger.wordpress.com/)

\- Rich Hickey -- [https://changelog.com/posts/rich-hickeys-greatest- hits](https://changelog.com/posts/rich-hickeys-greatest-hits)

\- Peter Bourgon -- [https://peter.bourgon.org/](https://peter.bourgon.org/)

\- Rebecca Murphey -- [https://rmurphey.com/](https://rmurphey.com/)

\- Daniel Greenfield -- [https://www.twoscoopspress.com/](https://www.twoscoopspress.com/)

</comment><comment><USER89> Uncle Bob. [https://cleancoders.com/](https://cleancoders.com/)

</comment><comment><USER90> John Walkenbach. [https://plus.google.com/+JohnWalkenbach](https://plus.google.com/+JohnWalkenbach)

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/+EliBenderskyGplus)

[https://plus.google.com/+JeanBaptisteQueru](https://plus.google.com/+JeanBaptisteQueru)

However, I've never seen an interesting post from them since, so I should probably stop following them.

<comment><USER45> Eli has highly technical in depth dry stuff. I followed him even before he joined google and became core python developer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> C: Salvatore Sanfillipo (antirez)

Python: Kenneth Reitz

JS: TJ Hollowaychuck

C++: John Carmack

Ruby: Aaron Patterson, _why

<comment><USER92> What's common about all those programmers is that they're consistently nice people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> Rich Hickey (Clojure, Datomic) and David Nolen (ClojureScript) - <USER4> helping us to express previously unthinkable thoughts

<comment><USER94> _consistently helping us to express previously unthinkable thoughts_

Care to share three or four?

<comment><USER93> Sure, there's a couple in this post: [http://tonsky.me/blog/the-web-after- tomorrow/](http://tonsky.me/blog/the-web-after-tomorrow/)

Humans think in language and as such the languages we use shape the ideas we can have, and as our ideas evolve we build upon old languages with new languages to express new ideas that old languages lacked the necessary atoms.

<comment><USER35> I write Clojure every day and enjoy it. I think Hickey/Nolen have clarified many ways of thinking about programming problems for me. I've learned a lot from them.

But this level of marketing spiel can be off-putting -- especially when you provide examples that non-web architectures have been using for many years.

Imagine I'm an experienced developer, and you've promised that I will be able to express previously unthinkable thoughts if I just learn what these guys are talking about. And then I look at it and it is exactly the same thing my colleagues and I have been doing for years in Java. What am I supposed to make of it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> ktoso: [https://github.com/ktoso](https://github.com/ktoso) \- he's not human, but If you want to do anything on the java/scala ecosystem, you need to follow him.

</comment><comment><USER96> Jonathan Blow (The Witness), Erich Ocean (Fohr), Howard Chu (LMDB), Dan Luu (BitFunnel) and Casey Muratori (Handmade Hero).

These developers have a unique way of looking at problems. I've gained a lot of valuable knowledge from them.

</comment><comment><USER97> Giulio Canti[0] - creator of tcomb library. He writes a lot about type systems and writing typesafe Javascript code.

\</comment><comment>-----

[0] [https://medium.com/@gcanti](https://medium.com/@gcanti)

</comment><comment><USER98> [Jeff Preshing]([https://twitter.com/preshing](https://twitter.com/preshing)). He is a master of threading primitives. His CppCon talks are enlightening.

</comment><comment><USER99> I don't know if he is considered a developer, but I think Justin Jackson has some awesome startup advice (for developers). He follows others closely and draws from their experiences as well.

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](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.

</comment><comment><USER100> I've been putting together a list of hackers, bug hunters, star developers (or notably popular at the organisations they work for), and a few IT/OPSEC/SIGINT style companies (and aggregators).

Still much work to be done, but feel free to check it out: [https://twitter.com/lemiffe/lists/tophackers/members](https://twitter.com/lemiffe/lists/tophackers/members)

</comment><comment><USER101> Mike bostock, the founder of d3.js

* cool blog articles: [https://bost.ocks.org/mike/](https://bost.ocks.org/mike/)

* Beautiful dataviz and tips on twitter: [https://twitter.com/mbostock](https://twitter.com/mbostock)

* github: [https://github.com/mbostock/](https://github.com/mbostock/)

</comment><comment><USER102> Jeremy Evans[0]: He has made a lot of useful tools for developers who want to implement a minimallistc approach to web development on Ruby.

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/](https://github.com/jeremyevans/)

1: [https://github.com/jeremyevans/sequel](https://github.com/jeremyevans/sequel)

2: [https://github.com/jeremyevans/roda](https://github.com/jeremyevans/roda)

3: [https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12024](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'.

</comment><comment><USER103> Some of my favorites...

* Tantek Çelik -> [http://tantek.com](http://tantek.com) and [https://indieweb.org](https://indieweb.org)

* Aaron Parecki -> [https://aaronparecki.com](https://aaronparecki.com) and [https://indieweb.org](https://indieweb.org)

* Patrick (patio11) McKenzie -> [http://www.kalzumeus.com](http://www.kalzumeus.com)

* Moxie Marlinspike -> [https://moxie.org](https://moxie.org)

* Scott Hanselman -> [http://www.hanselman.com](http://www.hanselman.com)

* Joel Spolsky -> [https://www.joelonsoftware.com](https://www.joelonsoftware.com)

* Jeff Atwood -> [https://blog.codinghorror.com](https://blog.codinghorror.com)

* Gina Trapani -> [http://ginatrapani.org](http://ginatrapani.org)

* Matthew Hodgson -> [http://matrix.org](http://matrix.org) and [https://riot.im](https://riot.im)

* Armin Ronacher -> [http://lucumr.pocoo.org](http://lucumr.pocoo.org)

* Jeffrey Zeldman -> [http://www.zeldman.com](http://www.zeldman.com)

* Eric Meyer -> [http://meyerweb.com](http://meyerweb.com)

</comment><comment><USER104> Steve [https://twitter.com/steveklabnik](https://twitter.com/steveklabnik)

He is awesome human being.

<comment><USER105> Yes, Steve is the best person on the internet indeed! Always outspoken, always protective, never nasty

<comment><USER106> > _always protective, never nasty_

Nobody's perfect

[https://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/771/](https://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/771/)

<comment><USER107> Yes, this is an incident I still regret deeply. I probably think about it once a week. It's one of the reasons that I'm a bit different these days than I am back then; I didn't want this to happen ever again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER108> Petr [http://petr-mitrichev.blogspot.com/](http://petr- mitrichev.blogspot.com/)

<comment><USER109> are you a competitive programmer?

</comment></comment><comment><USER110> For JavaScript there are a lot of great devs but these two are the guys who I like reading the most, IMHO they write code thats beautiful to look at and well designed.

1\. Jeremy Ashkenas - [https://github.com/jashkenas](https://github.com/jashkenas)

2\. Nathan Faucett - [https://github.com/nathanfaucett](https://github.com/nathanfaucett)

There are others that are really good from a technical skill/functional standpoint, ([https://github.com/jdalton](https://github.com/jdalton), [https://github.com/jeresig](https://github.com/jeresig), [https://github.com/douglascrockford](https://github.com/douglascrockford)) but I personally don't find their code as aesthetically pleasing i.e. Resig's love of the terniary statement.

</comment><comment><USER111> Armin Ronacher creator of Flask lucumr.pocoo.org

</comment><comment><USER112> I'm all about ideas; couldn't care less about individuals, including myself. Spending too much time with other people's work kills your creative spark and creates the super star culture we're currently struggling with collectively. We need more fresh perspectives and less idol/icon worship to get out of this mess.

</comment><comment><USER113> Linus Torvalds and Greg KH. I follow them on LKML, I have set up email filters which put their replies into separate folders.

</comment><comment><USER114> For InfoSec: Troy Hunt [https://www.troyhunt.com/](https://www.troyhunt.com/) and Eric Lawrence [https://textslashplain.com/](https://textslashplain.com/)

For JavaScript (particularly the language changes): Brendan Eich and Dominic Denicola

</comment><comment><USER115> I feel someone should include Marco Arment [twitter.com/arment] in this list. I don't know if he's a "master," but I have found his journey of building one- man projects to be inspiring.

Also, Maciej Ceglowski [twitter.com/pinboard]. His twitter is hilarious, even though I don't personally subscribe to his service.

</comment><comment><USER116> Craig Heffner: [https://github.com/devttys0](https://github.com/devttys0) [http://www.devttys0.com](http://www.devttys0.com)

Fabrice Bellard: [http://www.bellard.org](http://www.bellard.org)

</comment><comment><USER117> Avdi Grimm. He's basically the version of me that's better at a) programming, and b) communicating.

</comment><comment><USER118> 3 hours and nobody Linus Torvalds? I must be getting old...

<comment><USER119> If you wanted to follow him, how would you do it? He doesn't exactly have a blog, or other channels aimed at a wide audience

<comment><USER120> Subscribe to LKML, he posts regularly :)

Jokes aside, your can follow him on Google+

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER121> [Dave Winer]([http://scripting.com](http://scripting.com))

</comment><comment><USER122> Lennart Augustsson

[http://ioccc.org/winners.html#Lennart_Augustsson](http://ioccc.org/winners.html#Lennart_Augustsson)

[https://github.com/augustss](https://github.com/augustss)

</comment><comment><USER123> I don't really follow anyone, but here's a few whose work I've admired and learnt from (not just their code):

D. Richard Hipp (SQLite, Fossil) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._Richard_Hipp](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.

</comment><comment><USER124> As no one else has mentioned him yet: Mike Thompson, creator of re-frame (ClojureScript).

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](https://github.com/mike-thompson- day8)

[2] [https://twitter.com/wazound](https://twitter.com/wazound)

[3] [https://github.com/Day8/re-frame](https://github.com/Day8/re-frame)

</comment><comment><USER125> James Hague, "a recovering programmer who has been designing video games since the 1980s...", [http://prog21.dadgum.com](http://prog21.dadgum.com)

</comment><comment><USER126> Gary Bernhardt - [https://twitter.com/garybernhardt](https://twitter.com/garybernhardt) He's making great screencasts in his copmpany!

</comment><comment><USER127> Chris from Clickspring [1].

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.

[1] [http://www.clickspringprojects.com/](http://www.clickspringprojects.com/)

</comment><comment><USER128> If you're looking for cutting edge complete full stack development, Akshay Nihalaney has an excellent blog series where he shares building a high end production ready application step by step (i.e., Angular 2, SCSS, Material Design, automated testing, security, etc., etc.) [https://firstname.lastname@example.com](https://email@example.com)

</comment><comment><USER129> MPJ and his funfunfunction channel [https://www.youtube.com/mpjmevideos](https://www.youtube.com/mpjmevideos)

<comment><USER59> Very talented guy- his 'musings' on development-related matters are worth a watch too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER130> The great thing about following coder bloggers is that they don't actually blog all that often. So you can subscribe a lot without getting overloaded.

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!

</comment><comment><USER131> 1\. [Damian Gryski]([https://github.com/dgryski](https://github.com/dgryski)) - implements a bunch of modern academic papers (mostly in go). Also his twitter has a bunch more stuff.

2\. [Daniel Lemire]([http://lemire.me/en/](http://lemire.me/en/)) - comp sci professor who frequently blogs about interesting db/indexing topics

</comment><comment><USER132> Ted Unangst BSD dev. [http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/](http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/)

</comment><comment><USER133> I don't know if he can be considered a hard and fast 'developer' anymore, but I follow Rob Walling's work (softwarebyrob.com) pretty closely. His podcast with Mike is a nice open door to the life of a software/business engineer, and he's excellent at communicating complex tech or business problems in language that makes the ideas accessible to simpletons like me.

</comment><comment><USER134> [Zach Holman]([https://zachholman.com/](https://zachholman.com/)) is a big one for me.

</comment><comment><USER135> Second for TJ and Dan. I also like following James Kyle - [https://github.com/thejameskyle](https://github.com/thejameskyle) because he seems to keep people humble and realize we're pushing code not doing heart surgery. We're not some special snowflake that is above others.

</comment><comment><USER136> wait ..... john carmack, reason why i end up programming for a living

<comment><USER137> Same here. And he looks like a friend of mine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER138> A really big issue in simplicity and modesty.

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.

</comment><comment><USER139> I follow anyone on github who is doing something that's interesting.

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.

</comment><comment><USER140> Since no one mentioned them:

\- Joe Duffy

\- Raymond Chen

\- Eric Lippert

</comment><comment><USER141> I try to read most public mailing list posts (and for some, technical Google+ postings) by Linus Torvalds, Al Viro, Alan Cox, Ted Ts'o, Andy Lutomirski and the pseudonymous "George Spelvin".

I also keep a weather eye on the blogs of mjg59 and (not a developer, but an academic computer scientist) John Regehr.

</comment><comment><USER142> [https://ayende.com/blog](https://ayende.com/blog)

<comment><USER143> I used to but I've found that since RavenDB started the problems he has and blogs about are very different to the problems I face everyday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER144> Hmm... I don't really think of things in those terms. There are no individual developers that I explicitly "follow" to any particular degree. I think more about projects, although for single-developer projects I guess it's approximately the same difference.

</comment><comment><USER145> I'm not one to follow individuals. I prefer to follow projects that impress me. Within those there are often people who I have come to respect and will read what they have to say, but they usually only write on relevant tech stuff - not long form blog posts. Projects I look in on from time to time:

SolveSpace

risc-v

Rust (and Servo)

Daala

</comment><comment><USER146> A lot of great programming celebrities here. A little surprised not to see Joey Hess. He's more low key than most: [https://joeyh.name](https://joeyh.name)

Also, a second for Limor Fried, ladyada of adafruit.

</comment><comment><USER147> Lee Byron (@leeb) His work as a maintainer/evangelist of GraphQL is pretty impresive, in particular the way he communicates with contributors (i.e. soft skills) is something to learn from. He's also the author of immutable.js.

</comment><comment><USER148> \- Eric Lippert \- John Carmack \- Mark Seemann \- Scott Hanselman \- Scott Gu \- Phil Haack

... 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.

</comment><comment><USER149> Brandon Rhodes -- [http://rhodesmill.org/brandon/](http://rhodesmill.org/brandon/) Excellent speaker and has recorded some great talks on structuring your code.

</comment><comment><USER150> * Feross Aboukhadijeh ([https://github.com/feross](https://github.com/feross))

I've been following him since YT Instant. Always seems to be involved in some really exciting projects.

</comment><comment><USER151> Newsletters for me - [http://importpython.com](http://importpython.com) and [http://importgolang.com](http://importgolang.com) ...

</comment><comment><USER152> [Greg Hurrell]([https://wincent.com/](https://wincent.com/)) for Vim and Relay I wouldn't say closely follow, but I just really like the work he puts out there.

</comment><comment><USER153> Vitalik, one of the devs of Ethereum

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalik_Buterin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalik_Buterin)

</comment><comment><USER154> [John Skeet] ([https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/](https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/)) C#'s transcedence lord

</comment><comment><USER155> Java Posse [http://javaposse.com](http://javaposse.com) until the end. Even long after I had moved on from Java.

</comment><comment><USER156> Peteris Krumins - [http://www.catonmat.net](http://www.catonmat.net) always has interesting bits on his blog.

</comment><comment><USER157> Just one that hasn't been mentioned already:

\-- Derek Sivers: [https://sivers.org/](https://sivers.org/)

</comment><comment><USER158> Gary Bernhardt, [https://twitter.com/garybernhardt](https://twitter.com/garybernhardt)

</comment><comment><USER159> nowadays, none, thanks to restraining orders.

</comment><comment><USER160> Jonathan Blow, developer of The Witness.

[1] [http://the-witness.net](http://the-witness.net)

</comment><comment><USER161> David Nolan and Rich Hickey. Hilariously enough, I've probably written less than 100 lines of Clojure in my life.

</comment><comment><USER162> I'm surprised no one has yet to mention SirCmpwn. He's a HN regular and does a lot of truely amazing work.

</comment><comment><USER34> in addition to these great names I owe so much of my career to Yehuda Katz ([https://twitter.com/wycats](https://twitter.com/wycats)) so much so that I'll probably terrify him with a giant hug if we were ever to meet in person.

</comment><comment><USER163> From time-to-time I go over to Reginald Braithwaite's site at raganwald.com. He has the right mixture of practical and theoretical topics.

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.

</comment><comment><USER164> transcranial \- Because he is an MD and works on ML like me \- Because he is the guy behind kerasJS (Tensorflow on the browser)[1]

[1] [https://github.com/transcranial/keras- js](https://github.com/transcranial/keras-js)

</comment><comment><USER165> Anders Hejlsberg - Delphi/C#/TypeScript

Jeff Atwood - Coding Horror

Joel Spolsky - <USER5>

</comment><comment><USER166> For iOS development Mattt Thompson @mattt

For iOS animations Victor Baro @victorbaro

</comment><comment><USER167> I'm surprised no one here has mentioned Jose Valim yet.

</comment><comment><USER168> Harrison Kingsley aka sentdex for Python tutorials

</comment><comment><USER169> coderabbi, [https://twitter.com/coderabbi](https://twitter.com/coderabbi)

</comment><comment><USER170> Chris Roberts! (robertsspaceindustries.com)

</comment><comment><USER171> but, how do you follow them? follow them on github to get notifications? or do they have blogs?

</comment><comment><USER172> Asher from strong.ai

</comment><comment><USER173> Bret Victor

</comment><comment><USER30> Mike Acton, Casey Muratori, Sean Barret, Jonathan Blow, Shawn McGrath.

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.

<comment><USER174> The same for me plus more of that from Charles Bloom's epic blog ([http://www.cbloom.com/rants.html](http://www.cbloom.com/rants.html) and [http://www.cbloom.com/rambles.html](http://www.cbloom.com/rambles.html))

</comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra Steve Yegge [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/](http://steve- yegge.blogspot.com/)

Wil Shipley [https://blog.wilshipley.com/](https://blog.wilshipley.com/)

Yossi Kreinin [http://yosefk.com/](http://yosefk.com/)

All three brilliant, with good sense of humor and having good "vision thing"

</comment><comment><USER175> Meta: it's a bit funny when the article itself sets the lead by posting non- functional Markdown on this site. I see replies are joining in, too.

<comment> yoz-y Still, the beauty of markdown is that even if it does not get parsed, it is still legible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER176> I stalk Steve Klabnik since I'm happy to see anarchism represented in the community.

<comment><USER177> Haha, I mean yeah. Steve is so much fun.

But surely the state is seen with a more critical eye in this community than in society at large, no?

At PyCon, anyway, there's always a sense that, when the state finally falls (ideally with a whimper and not a bang) that we'll all be there for each other.

<comment><USER176> Sort of. There's definitely an anti-authoritian trend amongst hackers, but hackers are only part of the community; the rest are capitalists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER178> Lukas Eder, creator of jOOQ and a bit of a SQL wizard. Definitely upped my SQL reading things he's either written or retweeted. As a Hibernate refugee, jOOQ is a godsend.

</comment><comment><USER179> I don't follow developers, because of time. I tend to search for information I need, rather than follow someone and read what they have to say. If I did the latter I would be continuously distracted and overloaded with too many ideas to explore!</comment>


Bill Proposed to Outlaw End to End Encryption - <AUTHOR> https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/rep/releases/graham-cotton-blackburn-introduce-balanced-solution-to-bolster-national-security-end-use-of-warrant-proof-encryption-that-shields-criminal-activity <comment><USER2> Proposed bills almost never go anywhere [1], so barring something highly unusual, it's best to wait for a state change with more signal, a.k.a. significant new information (SNI) [2].

[1] [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20bills&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[2] [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22significant%20new%20information%22&sort=byDate&type=comment)

<comment><USER3> Australia passed an assistance and access law a couple of years ago that forces messaging providers to provide access to E2E encrypted messages. But of course Signal and WhatsApp can't do it because of the nature of the encryption.

In a completely dystopic move towards a surveillance state the government in Oz has been on tech companies' cases to give them back door access.

Better not to be complacent. These things start as just winning easy political points but erode digital citizen rights over time as we normalize surveillance states.

<comment><USER4> The consequences of the bill were widely misreported. From the day it was passed it had strong exceptions. Have a look at section 317ZG: [http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ta1997214...](http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ta1997214/s317zg.html)

You need to keep in mind that the tech media in Australia is just as rabid for clicks as the mainstream media, if not more rabid.

What the bill requires is that companies give _targeted_ assistance where they can do so _without_ compromising anybody else's security.

For example removing or weakening E2E encryption is absolutely not permitted by this bill, let alone required.

What might be permitted, for example, is adding a hard-coded list of account IDs to an app and if a user is in this list, the app sends plaintext to law enforcement. This would not impact anybody save the people who have been targeted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >Incentivizes technical innovation.

>Directs the Attorney General to create a prize competition to award participants who create a lawful access solution in an encrypted environment, while maximizing privacy and security.

Is this a joke?

<comment><USER6> >This type of "warrant-proof" encryption adds little to the security of the communications of the ordinary user

>"It adds so little but we actually need to remove it because we can't see it"

It'd be funny except for the senate.gov URL

<comment><USER7> I think what they mean to say is "ordinary users don't need crypto for everyday conversations". Which leads to "if you got nothing to hide...".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The hilarious part is the widespread demand for encrypted communication happened because of privacy invasions by the government.

The Streisand Effect for communication.

</comment><comment><USER9> The funny thing is, the government spying on citizens without a warrant is what popularized this technology with consumers to begin with. So, are we really going to trust them to get a warrant next time?

</comment><comment><USER10> Does this mean we could no longer use WhatsApp, FaceTime, Signal, and other simple peer-to-peer projects ? Export of cryptography was written for the Cold War but still affects developers today. It wouldn't be a surprise if that is the case since Daniel Bernstein already took a case against US Dept Justice.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States)

</comment><comment><USER11> We're becoming more Orwellian day by day.

And our children's children will wake up in a world that looks like communist China. Where every move we make is monitored, every interaction is scored, and every associate we have implicates us.

Computers are a fantastic gift, but they're being used to turn us into cattle.

<comment><USER9> > every move we make is monitored, every interaction is scored, and every > associate we have implicates us

If Snowden is telling the truth, and he seems very credible, we're basically there already. E2E encryption is among the most promising ways to retain our Fourth Amendment right (to have protection against unreasonable searches). Taking away E2EE is akin to taking away our fourth amendment right.

I don't want terrorism or other criminal activity, and I'm sorry if this makes some security roles more difficult, but the bill of rights must still be honored. I hope this argued well and goes to the supreme court if necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit"

The average age of US Senators is 61.8 years, nearly the oldest in U.S. history. Our policy-makers are seniors who won't be around to suffer under the consequences of their bad policy.

</comment><comment><USER13> Oh don't worry folks, it only applies to "terrorists and other bad actors".

God how terrifying, luckily its just 3 arch republicans proposing it, Graham, Cotton, Blackburn.

God knows though during the next national security crises all democrats will be onboard.

<comment><USER14> > God knows though during the next national security crises all democrats will > be onboard.

Not if Pelosi leaves/is supplanted, which I think could happen in the next congress. She's the major Dem arm-twister on intelligence issues; there are several others who are likeminded, but she's the power center.

And a lot of the younger Dems are far less impressed with the intelligence/natsec boogie-man presentations and more aware of privacy/security issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is inevitable whether this bill passes or not. There's simply too many political points to score here and little downsides as far as the government is actually concerned.

<comment><USER16> Unless it says that credit card companies are not liable for fraud due to intercepted encryption, I would think they would be some of the strongest opponents of this.

<comment><USER15> I haven't read the bill, but these kinds of things generally get amended at some point with all kinds of exceptions of which I am sure defense contractors, finance, and maybe health care will be exempt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's not in the bill system at "congress.gov" yet.

<comment><USER17> It's not S.4051, but no bill text or summary yet.

[1] [https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate- bill/405...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/4051)

</comment></comment><comment> mark-r So is this broad enough to make https illegal?

<comment><USER14> That is almost certainly already compromised. If the NSA cannot create arbitrary certs trusted by your browser, I'd be utterly shocked.

There have been several cert-vendor compromises publicized over the years - how many weren't publicized/discovered, and now many were not compromises, but rather subversions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> And this is the same government that HN users consistently want to "regulate tech".....</comment>