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Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?

551 points| krptos | 9 years ago

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.

264 comments

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[+] IgorPartola|9 years ago|reply
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.

[+] limedaring|9 years ago|reply
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/

[+] brokenmachine|9 years ago|reply
> non-male

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

[+] jMyles|9 years ago|reply
Hola limedaring. You rock. Thanks for adding this specifically non-male list. A shame you're being downvoted.

See you at PyCon?

[+] ssteigen|9 years ago|reply
I just created an account specifically so I could thank you for posting this list.

I had never heard of any of these developers before, and now I'm following several of them.

I feel inspired. :)

[+] har777|9 years ago|reply
Thank you for this !!
[+] ploggingdev|9 years ago|reply
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/

[+] koolba|9 years ago|reply
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?
[+] BlackjackCF|9 years ago|reply
I follow Julia on Twitter.

She always has great drawings/hilarious stuff that she posts. It's really inspiring.

[+] joe563323|9 years ago|reply
Jeff Atwood is not a serious programmer. He writes stories.
[+] caleblloyd|9 years ago|reply
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.

[+] mschaef|9 years ago|reply
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/

[+] kzisme|9 years ago|reply
For those who enjoy reading there's a chapter/interview with Brad in the book "Coders At Work". I really enjoyed his perspective on the industry.
[+] LukeB_UK|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] yla92|9 years ago|reply
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

[+] jcalabro|9 years ago|reply
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
[+] psyc|9 years ago|reply
Every time I get stuck on a project, I watch this video. It's about games, but IMO a lot of it applies to software projects in general, especially MVPs. How to ship something that works before it collapses under its own complexity. I think the bit about remembering to optimize for developer effort is gold.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjDsP5n2kSM

[+] cableshaft|9 years ago|reply
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.

[+] VLM|9 years ago|reply
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.

[+] mmosta|9 years ago|reply
Love your list, here are a few other hardware people that put out great stuff:

- Charles Lohr http://cnlohr.net/ mixed bag of art and hardware

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

[+] Davertron|9 years ago|reply
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...

[+] Shicholas|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] thom|9 years ago|reply
Agreed on David Nolen, although I regularly feel he doesn't know how much smarter than the average developer he is, and I find a lot of his work inscrutable from both the documentation and API standpoint.
[+] gf263|9 years ago|reply
I recently had the chance to see David Nolen speak at CUSEC, it was an amazing experience. I think back to it a lot.
[+] hackerkid|9 years ago|reply
* 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)

[+] unknown|9 years ago|reply

[deleted]

[+] mrsmn|9 years ago|reply
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/

[+] JustSomeNobody|9 years ago|reply
I enjoy David Beazley's presentations. My mind is usually mush after watching, though. He makes the difficult look way to easy.
[+] rahilb|9 years ago|reply
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

[+] tjholowaychuk|9 years ago|reply
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.