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Ask HN: Who are the Alpha Geeks you follow?

25 points by rrc ↗ HN
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, "... those supernerds who are always on the bloodiest tip of the bleeding edge, at least in their hobby activities." This probably applies to quite a few HN readers.

So who are you following and why?

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.

On a side note, if you agree with PG in his Great Hackers essay that, "Even hackers can't tell [who is a great hacker]," 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.

8 comments

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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.

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.
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.
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.