- Paul Graham
Paul Graham (b. Weymouth, England, 1964) is a Lisp programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist. He is the author of "On Lisp" (1993), "ANSI Common Lisp" (1995), and "Hackers & Painters" (2004).
- Larry Wall
Larry Wall (born September 27, 1954) is a programmer, linguist, and author, most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987. Wall earned his bachelor's degree from Seattle Pacific University in 1976. Wall is the author of the rn Usenet client and the nearly universally used patch program.
- Dave Thomas
Dave Thomas is a computer programmer and author/editor. He has written about Ruby. Dave and partner Andy Hunt wrote the The Pragmatic Programmer and run The Pragmatic Bookshelf publishing company, publishing award-winning and critically acclaimed books for software developers. Dave Thomas lives in Dallas, Texas. He moved to the United States from England in 1994. Dave has also coined the phrase 'Code Kata'.
- John Carmack
John D. Carmack II (born August 20 1970) is a widely recognized figure in the video game industry. A prolific American programmer, Carmack co-founded id Software, a computer game development company, in 1991. Carmack was the lead programmer of the highly successful id computer games "Commander Keen", "Wolfenstein 3D", "Doom", "Quake", and subsequent sequels to "Doom" and "Quake".
- David Heinemeier Hansson
David Heinemeier Hansson (born 1979 in Copenhagen) is a Danish programmer and the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web development framework and the Instiki wikis. He is also a partner at the web-based software development firm 37signals. In 1999 David founded and built an online gaming news website and community called Daily Rush, which he ran until 2001.
- Steve Wozniak
Dr. Stephan Gary "Woz" Wozniak (born August 11 1950 in San Jose, California) is a U.S. computer engineer and the co-founder of Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.), with Steve Jobs. His inventions and machines are credited with contributing greatly to the personal computer revolution of the 1970s. Wozniak created the Apple I and Apple II computers in the mid-1970s. The Apple II gained a sizable amount of popularity, …
- Sid Meier
Sidney K. Meier (born 1954 in Detroit, Michigan) is an American programmer and designer of some of the most commercially and critically successful computer strategy games of all time. Meier has won several accolades for both his contributions to the computer games industry and for the titles that have gained huge commercial successes. Meier is considered by many as one of the most important figures in the computer games industry.
- Guido van Rossum
Guido van Rossum is a Dutch computer programmer who is best known as the author of the Python programming language. In the Python community, Van Rossum is known as a "Benevolent Dictator for Life", meaning that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions where necessary.
- Miguel de Icaza
Miguel de Icaza (born c. 1972) is a Mexican free software programmer, best known for starting the GNOME and Mono projects. Miguel de Icaza was born in Mexico City and studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) but never received a degree. He came from a family of scientists in which his father was a physicist and his mother a biologist. He started writing free software in 1992.
- Rasmus Lerdorf
Rasmus Lerdorf (born November 22 1968 in Qeqertarsuaq, Greenland) is a Danish-Greenlandic programmer and the creator of the PHP programming language. He authored the first two versions. Rasmus also participated in the development of later versions of PHP led by a group of developers including Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, who later founded Zend Technologies.
- Rupert Goodwins
Rupert Goodwins (born May 23, 1965) is a British writer and technology journalist. His career actually started as a programmer for Sinclair Research in the early 1980s, working on the ZX Spectrum ROM. He remained with the company after its acquisition by Amstrad. He has written for a number of UK computer publications, including: * Sinclair User * Personal Computer World * PC Magazine UK * IT Week He currently works full-time for ZDNet UK, …
- Dmitry Sklyarov
Dmitry Sklyarov is a Russian computer programmer known for his 2001 arrest by American law enforcement over software copyright restrictions. He was later released and the charges were dropped.
- Scott Miller
Scott Miller is an entrepreneur and former game programmer. Miller is the founder and CEO of Apogee Software, Ltd. (currently known as 3D Realms Entertainment), started in 1987. He started as game programmer, but now handles primary business duties of the company, as well as producing and co-designing all third-party games associated with the company, including "Wolfenstein 3D", "Raptor", "Terminal Velocity", "Max Payne" and "Prey".
- Dries Buytaert
Dries Buytaert (19 November 1978 -) is an open-source software programmer and the founder of the Drupal CMS. He still heads the Drupal project. He resides in Belgium and as of 2003 he is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Ghent. From 1999-2000 he was the maintainer of the "GNU/Linux WLAN FAQ".
- Mark Russinovich
Mark Russinovich is a software engineer and author who works for Microsoft as a Technical fellow. He is a regular contributor to "TechNet Magazine" and "Windows IT Pro" magazine (previously called "Windows NT Magazine") on the subject of the Architecture of Windows 2000 and was co-author of "Inside Windows 2000" (4th edition). Russinovich is the author of many tools used by Windows NT and Windows 2000 kernel-mode programmers, …
- John Romero
John Romero is EVP of Game Development at Slipgate Ironworks, a new Bay Area MMO company he co-founded in September 2005. He was a co-Founder of Inside Out Software, Ideas From The Deep, id Software, Ion Storm, and Monkeystone Games. From his early Apple IIe games to the legendary Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Doom II, Heretic, Hexen, and Quake, Romero has made an indelible mark on the computer gaming industry.
- Richard Garriott
Richard Allen Garriott (born July 4, 1961; nickname Lord British and General British) is a significant figure in the video game industry. He was originally a game designer and programmer, but now engages in various aspects of computer game development.
- Tim Sweeney
Tim Sweeney is a computer game programmer and the founder of Epic Games, previously known as Epic MegaGames. He established Epic as a shareware company while he was a student majoring in mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland. Sweeney revealed that he had been interested in game development and computer programming since he was 10 years old. Tim finally started to make games, right out of his parents' basement where he lived.
- Michael Abrash
Michael Abrash is a highly regarded technical writer, and one of the top optimization and 80x86 assembly language programmers, a reputation cemented by his 1990 book "Zen of Assembly Language Volume 1: Knowledge." Unfortunately, the original 8086 processor, the focus of the book, was several generations behind the state of the art by the time the book was published. The much anticipated second volume was never published, …
- Robert Love
Robert Matthew Love (born September 25, 1981) is an American author, speaker, and open source software developer. He is best known as a Linux kernel hacker, due to his contributions to the Linux kernel, with notable work including the preemptive kernel, process scheduler, kernel event layer, virtual memory subsystem, and inotify. Love is also active in the GNOME community, working on NetworkManager, GNOME Volume Manager, Project Utopia and Beagle.
- John Backus
John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist. He led the team that invented the first widely used high-level programming language (FORTRAN) and was the inventor of the Backus-Naur form (BNF), the almost universally used notation to define formal language syntax. He also did research in function-level programming and helped to popularize it. The IEEE awarded Backus the W.W. McDowell Award in 1967 for the development of FORTRAN.
- Andrew Koenig
Andrew Koenig is a former AT&T researcher and programmer known for his work with C++. He is the author of "C Traps and Pitfalls" and his name is associated with Argument dependent name lookup, also known as “Koenig lookup”.
- Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz is a writer, web developer, and entrepreneur. At age 14 he was a co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification. Since then he has become a member of the W3C’s RDF Core Working Group, co-designed the formatting language Markdown with John Gruber, and has been involved in many other projects. Aaron was the founder of Infogami, a startup that was part of Y Combinator’s first Summer Founders Program. Previously, he attended Stanford University for a year, …
- Harald Welte
Harald Welte (born in 1979) is a programmer, living in Berlin, Germany. Within the free software community, Welte is well known as a hacker of the Linux kernel and for his activities in enforcing the GNU General Public License (GPL), the license that governs the use of much of free software. Welte is also involved in Openmoko, a Linux version for low-cost, high-volume phones such as the Neo1973.
- Simon Cozens
Simon Cozens (b. 1978) is a British Perl programmer, author, blogger and missionary. He is a graduate of Pembroke College, Oxford (where he studied Japanese) and All Nations Christian College (where he studied theology and missiology). He is the author of over 100 modules on CPAN, and several books on Perl programming. For several years, he was the administrator of Perl.com, a Perl webzine run by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
- Ken Arnold
Ken Arnold (Kenneth Cutts Richard Cabot Arnold, Kenneth C.R.C. Arnold) is a computer programmer well known as one of the developers of the 1980s dungeon-crawling computer game Rogue, contributions to the original Berkeley (BSD) distribution of Unix, books and articles about C/C++ (e.g. his 1980s/1990s Unix Review column "The C Advisor"), and high profile Java work (Jini, JavaSpaces).
- Brad Fitzpatrick
Bradley Joseph "Brad" Fitzpatrick (born February 5, 1980 in Iowa), often seen on the Internet under the nickname bradfitz, is an American programmer. He is best known as the creator of LiveJournal and is the author of many popular free software projects. Born in Iowa, Fitzpatrick grew up in Beaverton, Oregon and majored in computer science and minored in German at the University of Washington in Seattle.
- Bill Budge
Bill Budge (born c. 1954) is a computer game programmer and designer. His two main claims to fame are 1981's "Raster Blaster" and 1983's "Pinball Construction Set". Both these games were released originally for the Apple II. Budge says he became interested in computers while obtaining a PhD at UC Berkeley. He purchased an Apple II and began writing games. He enjoyed it so much that he dropped out of school and became a game programmer.
- Ron Gilbert
Ron Gilbert is an American computer game designer, programmer, and producer, best known for his work on several classic LucasArts adventure games, including "Maniac Mansion" and the first two "Monkey Island" games. Gilbert was also co-founder of Humongous Entertainment and its sister company Cavedog Entertainment. His games are generally focused on interactive storytelling.
- Steve Capps
Steve Capps is a computer programmer and engineer who is best known for his work on the Apple Inc. Macintosh computer and Newton OS during the 1980s and 1990s. He started working at the Xerox Corporation while still a computer science student at the Rochester Institute of Technology. In 1981, Capps started working for Apple on the Lisa project and he continued his work on the Macintosh, principally writing the Finder and Macintosh system utilities.
- Ellen Ullman
Ellen Ullman, a software engineer, writes with the energy of Boswell, the clarity of Orwell, and the warmth of Montaigne. You may wonder: how could a software engineer write so well? But you shouldn't wonder, you should read. Ullman is a wonderful writer and 'Close To The Machine' is a wonderful book.
- Xavier Leroy
Xavier Leroy is a French computer scientist and programmer. He is best known for his role as a primary developer of the Objective Caml system. He is senior scientist ("directeur de recherche") at the French government research institution INRIA. Leroy was admitted to the École normale supérieure in Paris in 1987, where he studied mathematics and computer science. From 1989 to 1992 he did his PhD in computer science under the supervision of Gérard Huet.
- Yuji Naka
is a video game designer, programmer, the former head of Sonic Team, a group of Sega programmers/designers, the lead programmer of the original "Sonic the Hedgehog" and the head of PROPE. After graduating High school, Yuji Naka decided to skip university and stay in his hometown of Osaka. During this time, Yuji worked long hours at various menial jobs. After quiting his last job, Yuji saw that Sega was looking for programming assistants.
- Paul Davis
Paul Davis (formerly aka Paul Barton-Davis) is best known for his work on audio software for the Linux operating system, and for his role as one of the first two programmers at Amazon.com. Davis grew up in the Midlands and in London. After studying molecular biology and biophysics. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1989. He lived in Seattle for seven years, before moving to Philadelphia in 1996.
- Michael Sweet
Michael Sweet is a computer scientist and is the primary developer and architect of Common Unix Printing System, flPhoto, HTMLDOC, and Mini-XML. He was the original developer of the Gimp-Print software (now called Gutenprint) and contributes to many other free software projects such as FLTK, Newsd, and Samba. He owns and runs Easy Software Products, a company that sells Internet printing and publishing software.
- Wietse Venema
Wietse Venema is best known for the software TCP Wrapper , which is still widely used today and is included with almost all unix systems. Wietse is also the author of the Postfix mail system and the co-author of the very cool suite of utilities called The Coroner's Toolkit or "TCT". He is currently working at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center and he has gratiously agreed to allow us to catch up with him and and see what he's been up to lately.
- Randall Munroe
Randall Munroe (born October 17, 1984) is a self-described "pen/pencil operator" and programmer best known for creating the webcomic "xkcd". Formerly a roboticist for NASA, in 2006 Munroe's contract was not renewed at NASA and he began to write "xkcd" full-time, supported by the sale of related merchandise. He is also the creator of the websites BestThing, The Funniest, The Fairest, and The Cutest, …
- Donald Becker
Donald Becker is a notable developer well known for writing many of the Ethernet drivers for the Linux operating system. Thousands of computers around the world routinely use his drivers to connect to the Internet. Becker also created Beowulf clustering while at NASA, using software to connect many inexpensive PCs to solve complex math problems typically reserved for classic supercomputers.
- Nat Friedman
Nathaniel Dourif Friedman (born August 6 1977), known as "Nat", is a programmer who co-founded Ximian along with Miguel de Icaza in 1999, a company that was later bought by Novell in 2003. Nat held the post of CEO of Ximian from 1999 to 2001 when Ximian brought in David Patrick as an external CEO after the company raised fifteen million dollars of venture capital. Before Ximian, Friedman worked on the GNU ROPE project, and interned at Silicon Graphics and Microsoft.
- Joe Hewitt
Joe Hewitt is a software programmer who is best known for work in creating Firefox and other tools like FireBug and DOM Inspector. Early and while still in high school he created the website Feff World with Douglas Palermo. From 1995 through 1999 was a DHTML-obsessed web developer. Those of you who were around in 1999 might remember the short-lived SWAT library.