from Hacker News

Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?

by krptos on 1/30/17, 1:22 PM with 264 comments

• by IgorPartola on 1/30/17, 4:08 PM

  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.

• by limedaring on 1/30/17, 4:16 PM

  Some amazing non-male developers:

  — Jen Simmons: http://labs.jensimmons.com/

  — Julia Evans: https://jvns.ca/

  — Lea Verou: http://lea.verou.me/

  — Mina Markham: http://mina.codes/

  — Sara Soueidan: https://sarasoueidan.com/articles/

  — Sarah Mei: http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/

  — Ana Tudor: https://thebabydino.github.io/

  — Anna Debenham: http://www.maban.co.uk/

• by ploggingdev on 1/30/17, 2:09 PM

  Julia Evans : https://jvns.ca

  Rachel : https://rachelbythebay.com/w/

  Jeff Atwood : https://blog.codinghorror.com/

  Joel Spolsky : https://www.joelonsoftware.com/

  Dan Luu : https://danluu.com/

  patio11 : http://www.kalzumeus.com/

• by caleblloyd on 1/30/17, 3:02 PM

  Brad Fitzpatrick - 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.

• by LukeB_UK on 1/30/17, 1:42 PM

  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.

• by yla92 on 1/30/17, 2:36 PM

  For Android dev related, I follow

  Jake Wharton : https://github.com/jakewharton , https://twitter.com/JakeWharton - He is well known in Android community. He has authored a lot of great libraries personally and under Square.

  Mark Murphy - https://commonsware.com/blog/

  Chris Banes - https://chris.banes.me/

  Cyril Mottier - https://cyrilmottier.com , https://twitter.com/cyrilmottier

  Dan Lew - http://blog.danlew.net/

  Donn Felker - http://www.donnfelker.com

  Mark Allison - https://blog.stylingandroid.com

  Jesse Wilson - https://publicobject.com/

  Roman Nurik - https://twitter.com/romannurik

• by jcalabro on 1/30/17, 1:53 PM

  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 - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCuoqzrsHlwv1YyPKLuMDUQ

• by VLM on 1/30/17, 2:36 PM

  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.

• by Davertron on 1/30/17, 2:08 PM

  David Nolen - http://swannodette.github.io/

  James Long - http://jlongster.com/

  I follow these guys for similar reasons. They always seem to be a couple steps ahead of the rest of the industry and it's frankly a little embarrassing how productive they are. Come to think of it maybe I'd feel better about myself as a programmer if I stopped following them...

• by hackerkid on 1/30/17, 4:30 PM

  * Feross Aboukhadijeh (https://github.com/feross)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• by mrsmn on 1/30/17, 2:16 PM

  David Beazley : http://www.dabeaz.com/

  Kenneth Reitz : https://www.kennethreitz.org/

  Armin Ronacher : http://lucumr.pocoo.org/

  Julien Danjou : https://julien.danjou.info/

  Hynek Schlawack : https://hynek.me/

  Donald Stufft : https://caremad.io/

• by Cyph0n on 1/30/17, 4:03 PM

  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)

  * 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)

• by kittenmittens on 1/30/17, 4:29 PM

  While i wouldn't say i "follow" them, i have found inspiration from

  Stephanie Hurlburt: https://twitter.com/sehurlburt

  Scott Hanselman: https://twitter.com/shanselman

  David Fowler: https://twitter.com/davidfowl

  Frank Krueger: https://twitter.com/praeclarum

  Troy Hunt: https://twitter.com/troyhunt

  Niall Merrigan: https://twitter.com/nmerrigan

• by base698 on 1/30/17, 3:22 PM

  Bret Victor: http://worrydream.com/ Gets posted a lot.

  Brendan Gregg: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/ Everything Linux Performance.

  Rich Hickey/David Nolen Mentioned enough around here.

• by theparanoid on 1/30/17, 1:39 PM

  Fabrice Bellard, http://www.bellard.org

• by queicherius on 1/30/17, 2:03 PM

  Since you seem to be in the web area:

  - Addy Osmani https://github.com/addyosmani - Paul Irish https://github.com/paulirish - Substack https://github.com/substack - Jeff Atwood https://blog.codinghorror.com/

• by rahilb on 1/30/17, 3:27 PM

  Mainly scala devs or java performance people:

  https://github.com/Atry

  https://github.com/lihaoyi

  https://github.com/davegurnell

  https://github.com/nitsanw

  https://github.com/mjpt777

  https://github.com/milessabin

  https://github.com/xeno-by

  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

• by malhaar on 1/30/17, 7:51 PM

  Ned Batchelder. Blog - http://nedbatchelder.com/ Stack Overflow answers - http://stackoverflow.com/users/14343/ned-batchelder Coverage.py - https://github.com/nedbat/coveragepy Twitter - 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.

• by tjholowaychuk on 1/30/17, 5:48 PM

  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.

• by phillc73 on 1/30/17, 3:23 PM

  All R related:

  Hadley Wickham - https://github.com/hadley

  Joe Cheng - https://github.com/jcheng5

  Yihui Xie - https://github.com/yihui

  JJ Allaire - https://github.com/jjallaire

  Dean Attali - https://github.com/daattali

  Bob Rudis - https://github.com/hrbrmstr

  Kent Russell - https://github.com/timelyportfolio

  Jeroen Ooms - https://github.com/jeroenooms

• by keymone on 1/30/17, 1:52 PM

  https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey-fanclub

• by aiyagari on 1/30/17, 3:54 PM

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

  http://hintjens.com/

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

• by The_Hoff on 1/30/17, 3:02 PM

  Jessie Frazelle : https://blog.jessfraz.com - Funny, culturally aware, and works with a lot of things that are going to be shaping our world. Also, @jessfraz

• by beefman on 1/30/17, 7:51 PM

  John Carmack https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack

  Fabrice Bellard http://www.bellard.org/

  Douglas Crockford https://github.com/douglascrockford

  Guillermo Rauch https://zeit.co/blog

  James Halliday https://github.com/substack

  Terry Cavanagh http://distractionware.com/blog/

  Sam Gentle https://twitter.com/sgentle

  Caolan McMahon https://github.com/caolan

• by leshow on 1/30/17, 4:42 PM

  Most guys I follow are either rust or haskell developers.

  @manishearth - rust - https://manishearth.github.io/

  @bitemyapp - writer of haskell: first principles

  @bartoszmilewski - haskell - https://bartoszmilewski.com/

  @jdegoes - writes informative FP blog posts - http://degoes.net/

  @aaron_turon - rust - https://aturon.github.io/blog/

  @pcwalton - rust

  @nikomatsakis - rust - http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/

  @paf31 - purescript creator

  @nick_r_cameron - rust

  @kmett - famous haskeller

  @steveklabnik - rust - http://words.steveklabnik.com/

• by yawaramin on 1/30/17, 8:08 PM

  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.

• by martijn_himself on 1/30/17, 2:04 PM

  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/

• by rocky1138 on 1/30/17, 3:01 PM

  Sebastian Lague: https://twitter.com/SebastianLague

  Tim Sweeney: https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic

  John Carmack: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack

  Macy Kuang: https://twitter.com/MacyKuang

  Jeri Ellsworth: https://twitter.com/jeriellsworth

  Ryan Speets: https://twitter.com/RyanSpeets

  Harvey Ball: https://twitter.com/The_StoneFox

• by vanderZwan on 1/30/17, 1:52 PM

  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/

• by sakura-rb on 1/30/17, 4:10 PM

  I'm a Ruby user, these are my inspiration

  * Yehuda Katz - https://twitter.com/wycats

  * Steve Klabnik - https://twitter.com/steveklabnik

  * Aaron Patterson - https://twitter.com/tenderlove

  * Charles Nutter - https://twitter.com/headius

• by sapeien on 1/30/17, 4:03 PM

  Troll picks:

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

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

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

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

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

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

• by hunterjrj on 1/30/17, 1:59 PM

  John Carmack

  https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack

• by dijit on 1/30/17, 4:17 PM

  Bryan Cantrill.

  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/

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

  Kyle Fuller

  https://github.com/kylef

  Guy is like a UNIX programmer for the modern age.

• by rajathagasthya on 1/30/17, 2:13 PM

  Raymond Hettinger - https://twitter.com/raymondh

  David Beazley - https://twitter.com/dabeaz

  Kenneth Reitz - https://github.com/kennethreitz

• by gtrubetskoy on 1/30/17, 2:00 PM

  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.

• by sinamdar on 1/30/17, 2:03 PM

  Peter Norvig. http://norvig.com

• by fapjacks on 1/30/17, 3:20 PM

  Windytan (Oona Räisänen):

  http://www.windytan.com/

  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.

• by Amorymeltzer on 1/30/17, 1:54 PM

  Marco Arment, of tumblr, instapaper, Overcast, and ATP: https://marco.org/, https://twitter.com/marcoarment

  Gary Bernhardt, of wat: https://github.com/garybernhardt, https://twitter.com/garybernhardt

• by fa17 on 1/30/17, 4:20 PM

  Scott Hanselman(dotnet and random h/w hacks) -http://www.hanselman.com/

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

• by nicolasMLV on 1/30/17, 2:05 PM

  David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO of Basecamp and Creator of Ruby on Rails https://www.twitter.com/dhh

• by AdamGibbins on 1/30/17, 1:37 PM

  Dan Luu: http://danluu.com/

• by osullivj on 1/30/17, 1:36 PM

  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 [2] https://github.com/stratacode

• by OJFord on 1/30/17, 3:27 PM

  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).

  Always working on something interesting to talk about on 'The Bike Shed' podcast, which I 'follow'/would recommend in its own right.

  Podcast: http://bikeshed.fm

  Github: https://github.com/sgrif

• by deathanatos on 1/30/17, 4:55 PM

  Rachel: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/

  Kyle Kingsbury, for his Jepsen series: https://aphyr.com/tags/jepsen

• by g3rv4 on 1/30/17, 1:38 PM

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

• by gjkood on 1/30/17, 2:06 PM

  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...)

  Founders At Work (https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/...)

  Architecture of Open Source Systems (https://www.amazon.com/Architecture-Open-Source-Applications...)

  Architecture of Open Source Systems - Vol 2 (https://www.amazon.com/Architecture-Open-Source-Applications...)

• by ggregoire on 1/30/17, 2:25 PM

  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)

• by charlescearl on 1/30/17, 3:41 PM

  Oleg Kiselyov on functional programming http://okmij.org/ftp/

• by coderjames on 1/30/17, 2:06 PM

  Casey Muratori: https://mollyrocket.com/casey/

• by badosu on 1/30/17, 8:38 PM

  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/

  1: https://github.com/jeremyevans/sequel

  2: https://github.com/jeremyevans/roda

  3: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12024

  Edit: formatting

  Edit: Also forgot to mention, I really like his approach on developing frameworks with great extensibility and modularity leveraging Ruby's capabilities without 'magic'.

• by eddie_31003 on 1/30/17, 4:58 PM

  I hadn't seen links to these guys.

  Martin Fowler - https://www.martinfowler.com/

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

• by danesparza on 1/30/17, 6:14 PM

  Excellent list of devs already. I would add:

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

  John Gruber: http://daringfireball.net/

• by johnhenry on 1/30/17, 4:00 PM

  Dr. Axel Rauschmayer : http://www.2ality.com/

• by heyts on 1/30/17, 11:43 PM

  This is fun. Here's mine:

  - Brad fitzpatrick -- http://bradfitz.com/

  - Julia Evans -- https://jvns.ca

  - Raymond Hettinger -- https://rhettinger.wordpress.com/

  - Rich Hickey -- https://changelog.com/posts/rich-hickeys-greatest-hits

  - Peter Bourgon -- https://peter.bourgon.org/

  - Rebecca Murphey -- https://rmurphey.com/

  - Daniel Greenfield -- https://www.twoscoopspress.com/

• by diyseguy on 1/30/17, 1:48 PM

  Uncle Bob. https://cleancoders.com/

• by novia on 1/30/17, 10:06 PM

  John Walkenbach. 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/+JeanBaptisteQueru

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

• by tbrock on 1/30/17, 2:14 PM

  C: Salvatore Sanfillipo (antirez)

  Python: Kenneth Reitz

  JS: TJ Hollowaychuck

  C++: John Carmack

  Ruby: Aaron Patterson, _why

• by dustingetz on 1/30/17, 2:26 PM

  Rich Hickey (Clojure, Datomic) and David Nolen (ClojureScript) - consistently helping us to express previously unthinkable thoughts

• by merb on 1/30/17, 1:56 PM

  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.

• by lj3 on 1/30/17, 2:24 PM

  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.

• by picardo on 1/30/17, 3:25 PM

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

  -----------

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

• by zamalek on 1/30/17, 1:57 PM

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

• by mattbgates on 1/31/17, 11:38 PM

  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

  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.

• by lemiffe on 1/30/17, 1:49 PM

  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

• by me_bx on 1/30/17, 11:14 PM

  Mike bostock, the founder of d3.js

  * cool blog articles: https://bost.ocks.org/mike/

  * Beautiful dataviz and tips on twitter: https://twitter.com/mbostock

  * github: https://github.com/mbostock/

• by mxuribe on 1/30/17, 3:02 PM

  Some of my favorites...

  * Tantek Çelik -> http://tantek.com and https://indieweb.org

  * Aaron Parecki -> https://aaronparecki.com and https://indieweb.org

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

  * Moxie Marlinspike -> https://moxie.org

  * Scott Hanselman -> http://www.hanselman.com

  * Joel Spolsky -> https://www.joelonsoftware.com

  * Jeff Atwood -> https://blog.codinghorror.com

  * Gina Trapani -> http://ginatrapani.org

  * Matthew Hodgson -> http://matrix.org and https://riot.im

  * Armin Ronacher -> http://lucumr.pocoo.org

  * Jeffrey Zeldman -> http://www.zeldman.com

  * Eric Meyer -> http://meyerweb.com

• by 0xFFC on 1/30/17, 1:56 PM

  Steve https://twitter.com/steveklabnik

  He is awesome human being.

• by alexee on 1/30/17, 2:07 PM

  Petr http://petr-mitrichev.blogspot.com/

• by jfaucett on 1/30/17, 2:28 PM

  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

  2. Nathan Faucett - https://github.com/nathanfaucett

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

• by slowrabbit on 1/30/17, 3:43 PM

  Armin Ronacher creator of Flask lucumr.pocoo.org

• by codr4life on 1/30/17, 4:47 PM

  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.

• by andrey_utkin on 1/30/17, 8:58 PM

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

• by nailer on 1/30/17, 3:45 PM

  For InfoSec: Troy Hunt https://www.troyhunt.com/ and Eric Lawrence https://textslashplain.com/

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

• by aelmeleegy on 1/30/17, 1:53 PM

  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.

• by bcook on 1/30/17, 4:38 PM

  Craig Heffner: https://github.com/devttys0 http://www.devttys0.com

  Fabrice Bellard: http://www.bellard.org

• by regularfry on 1/30/17, 3:21 PM

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

• by ifdefdebug on 1/30/17, 4:32 PM

  3 hours and nobody Linus Torvalds? I must be getting old...

• by shellab on 1/30/17, 1:34 PM

  [Dave Winer](http://scripting.com)

• by mightybyte on 1/30/17, 2:01 PM

  Lennart Augustsson

  http://ioccc.org/winners.html#Lennart_Augustsson

  https://github.com/augustss

• by sdfjkl on 1/30/17, 3:26 PM

  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

  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.

• by olieidel on 1/30/17, 11:00 PM

  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

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

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

• by mtrn on 1/30/17, 3:46 PM

  James Hague, "a recovering programmer who has been designing video games since the 1980s...", http://prog21.dadgum.com

• by iansowinski on 1/30/17, 2:02 PM

  Gary Bernhardt - https://twitter.com/garybernhardt He's making great screencasts in his copmpany!

• by jmts on 1/31/17, 2:54 AM

  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/

• by worknhard99 on 2/3/17, 2:56 PM

  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://blog.realworldfullstack.io/@akshay.nihalaney

• by chhib on 1/30/17, 2:03 PM

  MPJ and his funfunfunction channel https://www.youtube.com/mpjmevideos

• by jldugger on 1/30/17, 4:57 PM

  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!

• by geeio on 1/31/17, 8:48 AM

  1. [Damian Gryski](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/) - comp sci professor who frequently blogs about interesting db/indexing topics

• by justaman on 1/30/17, 2:04 PM

  Ted Unangst BSD dev. http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/

• by somuchpizza on 1/31/17, 5:21 AM

  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.

• by Shank on 1/30/17, 2:31 PM

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

• by SnowingXIV on 2/10/17, 2:03 PM

  Second for TJ and Dan. I also like following James Kyle - 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.

• by smallhands on 1/30/17, 2:05 PM

  wait ..... john carmack, reason why i end up programming for a living

• by throw2016 on 1/30/17, 3:57 PM

  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.

• by nojvek on 1/30/17, 6:15 PM

  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.

• by curiousDog on 1/30/17, 2:43 PM

  Since no one mentioned them:

  - Joe Duffy

  - Raymond Chen

  - Eric Lippert

• by caf on 1/31/17, 12:13 AM

  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.

• by OliverLassen on 1/30/17, 2:27 PM

  https://ayende.com/blog

• by mindcrime on 1/30/17, 3:45 PM

  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.

• by phkahler on 1/30/17, 3:09 PM

  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

• by daveguy on 1/30/17, 2:49 PM

  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

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

• by juancampa on 1/30/17, 9:26 PM

  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.

• by HeavyStorm on 1/31/17, 11:32 AM

  - 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.

• by btashton on 1/30/17, 4:18 PM

  Brandon Rhodes -- http://rhodesmill.org/brandon/ Excellent speaker and has recorded some great talks on structuring your code.

• by lwithers on 1/31/17, 7:54 AM

  * Feross Aboukhadijeh (https://github.com/feross)

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

• by versesane on 2/2/17, 7:30 PM

  Newsletters for me - http://importpython.com and http://importgolang.com ...

• by rojobuffalo on 1/30/17, 7:21 PM

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

• by jhildings on 1/30/17, 7:56 PM

  Vitalik, one of the devs of Ethereum

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalik_Buterin

• by ZeroClickOk on 1/30/17, 10:36 PM

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

• by flurdy on 1/30/17, 2:13 PM

  Java Posse http://javaposse.com until the end. Even long after I had moved on from Java.

• by godzillabrennus on 1/31/17, 12:51 AM

  Peteris Krumins - http://www.catonmat.net always has interesting bits on his blog.

• by ivanyv on 2/3/17, 2:52 PM

  Just one that hasn't been mentioned already:

  -- Derek Sivers: https://sivers.org/

• by nazgob on 1/30/17, 2:01 PM

  Gary Bernhardt, https://twitter.com/garybernhardt

• by yunolisten on 1/30/17, 2:07 PM

  nowadays, none, thanks to restraining orders.

• by felipemnoa on 1/30/17, 5:41 PM

  Jonathan Blow, developer of The Witness.

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

• by alexbanks on 1/31/17, 6:57 PM

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

• by gravypod on 1/30/17, 3:03 PM

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

• by Shicholas on 1/30/17, 2:11 PM

  in addition to these great names I owe so much of my career to Yehuda Katz (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.

• by bpyne on 1/30/17, 5:09 PM

  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.

• by merqurio on 1/30/17, 9:26 PM

  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

• by rajeemcariazo on 1/30/17, 4:20 PM

  Anders Hejlsberg - Delphi/C#/TypeScript

  Jeff Atwood - Coding Horror

  Joel Spolsky - StackOverflow

• by marvel_boy on 1/30/17, 2:13 PM

  For iOS development Mattt Thompson @mattt

  For iOS animations Victor Baro @victorbaro

• by sbensu on 1/31/17, 3:36 AM

  I'm surprised no one here has mentioned Jose Valim yet.

• by pknerd on 1/30/17, 5:32 PM

  Harrison Kingsley aka sentdex for Python tutorials

• by jopacicdev on 1/30/17, 1:44 PM

  coderabbi, https://twitter.com/coderabbi

• by m0llusk on 1/30/17, 5:38 PM

  Chris Roberts! (robertsspaceindustries.com)

• by esseti on 1/30/17, 3:45 PM

  but, how do you follow them? follow them on github to get notifications? or do they have blogs?

• by amirouche on 1/30/17, 4:23 PM

  Asher from strong.ai

• by abrak on 2/10/17, 3:32 AM

  Bret Victor

• by jackmott on 1/30/17, 3:25 PM

  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.

• by guard-of-terra on 1/30/17, 4:21 PM

  Steve Yegge http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/

  Wil Shipley https://blog.wilshipley.com/

  Yossi Kreinin http://yosefk.com/

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

• by unwind on 1/30/17, 1:41 PM

  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.

• by nilved on 1/30/17, 3:07 PM

  I stalk Steve Klabnik since I'm happy to see anarchism represented in the community.

• by 67726e on 1/30/17, 3:56 PM

  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.

• by bbcbasic on 1/30/17, 6:52 PM

  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!