

Ask HN: Who are the Alpha Geeks you follow? - rrc

Tim O'Reilly once famously claimed that by following the "alpha geeks" you can see what's going to be a significant technology down the road. Chad Fowler describes them as, <i>"... those supernerds who are always on the bloodiest tip of the bleeding edge, at least in their hobby activities."</i> This probably applies to quite a few HN readers.<p>So who are you following and why?<p>I'll go first: Rich Hickey, for his amazing work bringing a Lisp to the JVM and moving STM concepts deeper into practice. I especially enjoyed his talks on InfoQ about state and identity.<p>On a side note, if you agree with PG in his Great Hackers essay that, <i>"Even hackers can't tell [who is a great hacker],"</i> then the Alpha Geek concept becomes moot since you can't actually detect the true alpha geek. There is the possibility, of course, that perception becomes reality.
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mbrubeck
Here are my top ten, mostly web-related in some way because of my interests.
These are the "loud alpha geeks" - the ones who broadcast their interests via
regularly-updated blogs or curated links. (There are plenty of "quiet alpha
geeks" who are just as "alpha" but not as easy to follow online.)

Brad Fitzpatrick (<http://brad.livejournal.com/>) - creator of LiveJournal and
Danga, now at Google working on PubSubHubbub, the Social Graph API, etc.

John Resig (<http://ejohn.org/>,
<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jeresig>) - jQuery, Mozilla, lots of
other JavaScript and browser stuff.

Paul Bucheit (<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=paul>) - creator of GMail
and FriendFeed, now at Facebook.

Ryan Tomayko (<http://tomayko.com>) - Ruby, Sinatra, now working at GitHub,
has an excellent linkblog.

Simon Willison (<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonw>) - Django,
Python, also has an excellent linkblog.

Leslie Orchard (<http://decafbad.com/>) - Previously at Delicious/Yahoo, wrote
books on JavaScript, Dojo, RSS, now at Mozilla. Follow his bookmarks at:
<http://delicious.com/deusx>

Mark Pilgrim (<http://diveintomark.org/>) - Atom, HTML5, Linux, Python,
Greasemonkey, formerly at IBM, now at Google. Bookmarks at:
<http://delicious.com/wearehugh>

John Gruber (<http://daringfireball.net/>) - Apple news and punditry,
linkblog.

Sam Ruby (<http://intertwingly.net/blog/>) - Atom, Python, Ruby, Rails, XML,
HTML5, SVG. Read what he reads at: <http://planet.intertwingly.net/>

Kevin Kelly (<http://kk.org/kk/>) - Whole Earth Catalog, WELL, Wired magazine,
Cool Tools, various books. Compared to the rest of my list, KK does much more
big-picture thinking about technology and society.

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...and some of the not-so-loud alpha geeks who I wish posted more (but not
really, they probably get more done if they're not blogging all the time):

Dustin Sallings (<http://dustin.github.com/>, <http://delicious.com/dustin>) -
memcached, Python, Twisted, Erlang, Java, C, etc, etc, etc.

Tom Preston-Werner (<http://tom.preston-werner.com/>) - GitHub, Ruby, God,
Jekyll.

Richard Johnes (<http://www.metabrew.com/>) - Last.fm, Playdar, Erlang.

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prosa
Joe Damato's posts are always fascinating reminders of the benefit of
understanding what's under the hood.

<http://timetobleed.com/>

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camperman
I've taken lots of Steve Yegge's advice - more than anyone else I've read -
but I only catch up with what he's doing once a quarter or so.

------
MaysonL
Alan Kay, and his colleagues at vpri.org

Gilad Bracha, and the newspeak crew at newspeaklanguage.org

Terry Jones, at fluidinfo.com

~~~
rrc
I really liked Gilad Bracha's presentation on Newspeak. His concept libraries
as a nested class structure, with the ability to override just a single nested
class seems like a great forking mechanism to encourage reuse.

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runevault
I can't think of anyone else off the top of my head who I consider a real
alpha geek, but Rich blows my mind on a constant basis with clojure and how
he's doing things there. Not just the technical work, but his taste in design
is impressive.

~~~
freebsd_dude
clojure is cool. I just got a book yesterday.

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freebsd_dude
I prefer to read up on people whose work is timeless: Claude Shannon, John
Tukey, Jon Klienberg, the bioinformaticians whose work will one day discover a
cure for cancer, etc.

