Influencess

This website's design was heavily inspired by the work of Nikita Prokopov. You should check out his take on redesigning GitHub.

Paul Graham is quite possibly my biggest professional influence. In fact, he influenced an entire generation of young technologists and entrepreneurs, and the effecs of his influence have been shown to be long-lasting. Beating the Averages, Being Popular, Why Nerds are Unpopular, The Hundred-Year Language and How to Make Wealth are my favorite pieces.

Claus Wahlers is an old school Flash and ActionScript hacker (currently kicking ass on React-land). He is the author of DENG, a crazy Flash browser implementation that implemented various W3C standards before they landed anywhere else. He also wrote FC64, a Commodore 64 emulator for Flash Player 9. Back in the day these were prime examples of ActionScript mastery. He mentored me in my early years as a programmer and unwillingly taught me most of my English over instant messaging.

Mark Pilgrim blogged about technology and everything else for about 10 years before he vanished from the internet. He wrote Dive Into Accessibility, Dive Into Python, Dive Into Python 3 and most recently, HTML5: Up & Running. He also wrote the Universal Feed Parser, which I believe is the most complete, fault-tolerant RSS and Atom parser out there. He was one of the main advocates of the Atom format during its development.

Maciej Ceglowski makes great web software, writes intriguing essays and contributes to real change. To paraphrase his own words, he lives everywhere he can. He seems to live a truly mobile life which results in the most interesting little stories. His articles on vector space search engines and bloom filters introduced me to code that inspired me to study, investigate and write good software.

Joe Gregorio is the co-author of the Atom Publishing Protocol specification and a blogger advocating good software development practices. He has also authored the URI templates specification and the Python libraries httplib2 and mimeparse. Lately it seems Joe also has left Python work to focus on modern JavaScript.

Simon Willison has been for a long time one of my main references in Python programming. He has a good eye for exciting emergent technology, having told us to stop everything we were doing to go learn Node.js a year before it started getting so massively popular.

Mark Nottingham is a one-man standards body. In fact, it was his blog that introduced me to the IETF in the first place. It was after reading his Caching Tutorial that I bothered to learn HTTP and dive into others underlying protocols of the web. He is also the co-author of the Atom format specification. His website and writings influenced my sense of simplicity a great deal.

Tim Bray is one of the co-editors of the XML specification. His blog covers the recent history of modern web software development and has some articles you just can't miss.

Ryan Tomayko is the founder of lesscode.org, a blog which advocated smarter and leaner enterprise applications through the use of open source software and scripting languages. The archives are filled with goodies. Ryan also worked at GitHub for a long time.

Hugh MacLeod has been amusing and educating me for a long time with his cartoons and guerrilla business advice. He's still blogging and tweeting like crazy. One of my essential daily reads.

Paul Ford is my brand of obsessive. He listened to all of the songs from SXSW 2008 and published a review for every and each one of them. He came up with 200 ingeniously hilarious ways to say "I Love You". He makes a difference. He freely ponders about cleaning his room and anything else that comes to mind.

Michael Barrish is quite possibly my favorite writer. Pervert, Inscription and Letter are must reads. I remember when I first read them several years ago, I think it was the very first time I stopped to think about how good content can and does come out of the web. All of his stories would make a classic book.