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Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?

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Re: Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?

#231

Post by adamsea »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #115
contravariant wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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.

This. +1+1

Re: Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?

#232

Post by sh87 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #125

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 se…

I don't agree with the view that following specific people's work is the equivalent of cult personality, although thats how cults start out. It's not transpositional.

It's a decent starting point for those just starting out in the community/open source culture to get the hang of it.

The general idea however is to keep an eye out on places like HN to general trends and follow popular/radical repositories in those areas.

However, I would strongly suggest to not fall for the trap and limit yourself to just following people / news. Get the news but dig deeper, read posts on that topic, clone and play around with repositories, create and share small projects, connect this to what you already know and create ideas, no matter how useless you think it is, read influential papers (re-read them) and get involved in conversations on them.

That is more fulfilling and impactful than following personalities.

Re: Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?

#233

Post by [deleted] »

mej10 wrote: post #198
dustingetz wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, there's a couple in this post: 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.

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 unthi…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?

#234

Post by sbensu »

thom wrote: post #43
Davertron wrote: post #37

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...

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.

That impression goes away quickly when you meet him since he is a tremendously empathic person and clear speaker. The difference, in my opinion, is that he expects another level of effort/investment from the consumers of his work than other open source contributors.

That mismatch often causes frustration from people that are not used to it. In my case, it quickly went away once I understood the implicit contract.

Re: Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?

#237

Post by brokenmachine »

limedaring wrote: post #129

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/

> non-male

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

Re: Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?

#238

Post by brokenmachine »

joe563323 wrote: post #210
ploggingdev wrote: post #39

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/

Jeff Atwood is not a serious programmer. He writes stories.

What's wrong with stories?

Re: Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?

#239

Post by somuchpizza »

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.

Re: Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?

#240

Post by evilnode »

limedaring wrote: post #129

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/

I would add Erica Sadun to this list. She's been my go-to authority for all things ObjC (and now Swift) since 2008.

http://ericasadun.com/

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