The good guys at The Changelog podcast (Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo) used to ask this question to people the interview on the show.
It's nice to see who are the heroes of people you really think are great programmers themselves. So, it would be nice to see who are this community's heroes. I'll start.
My programming hero is Dennis Ritchie. Not only for his technical skills but mainly for the huge contributions he made to the evolution of computer systems, software development and programming teaching and learning.
Let's go. Who is your programming hero?
Latest comments (22)
Dennis Nedry (RIP)
“You know anybody who can network 8 connection machines and debug 2 million lines of code for what I bid for this job?”.
Mine are PG and Joel Spolsky. Mostly for their essays and opinions about software development.
I have a few but the one I'll put first in my list is the creator of jQuery: John Reisig because he paved the path of modern JS.
The hero that changed my attitude towards programming is Joel Spolsky
Some of my heroes have already been mentioned but I cannot see Linus Torvalds, so I take this one!
I'm going to be that person.
Steve Jobs. He wasn't a developer per-say.. but he challenged the system to continually make things better. I think thats something devs need more of. By the time a feature comes back to us for the 3rd time for fixes, we're ready to burn it to the ground. Maybe instead of getting frustrated, we need to look at how to make it BETTER and if that means burning it to the ground and starting over so-be-it. We need to do better.
Or maybe whenever feeling frustrated we should start calling people names? :-)
Lol. Hasn't worked so well for me, but I've definitely tried 😂
Scott Hanselman, love his articles, his podcast and a lot of the stuff he has done with MVC, he seems like a really fun guy. Also I list Anders Hejlsberg (Creator of C#), Niklaus Wirth(Creator of Pascal) & Dennis Richie as personal heroes of mine!
I love Kent C. Dodds. My reason is similar to yours.
I like Val Head a lot – her excitement about web animation really comes across immediately, if you ever hear her speak in person. She's incredibly talented, and her passion is contagious.
I've really enjoyed the Developer Tea podcast by Jonathan Cutrell. His focus on the importance of soft skills has been a nice break from the usual dev media, and his episode on applying to speak at conferences is what motivated me to throw my hat in the ring (and get chosen) to speak at a major conference last year – so I'm quite grateful to him.
On a personal note, my uncle (who I won't embarrass by linking here) who has been a software dev since I've been born. He's always encouraged me and been happy to answer questions and share experiences. I love having development as something in common with him.
And, since nobody has said it yet, can't forget about Ada Lovelace – not just the first female programmer, but the first programmer full-stop. What a badass.
Ada Lovelace is my hero!
First dev, how cool is that?