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If you could meet your tech hero, what's one question you would like to know?

Adele Francois on December 20, 2017

Feel free to let us know who your tech hero is and why! :)

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Christian Vasquez • Edited

I'm currently in a mind-battle between Elon Musk and Larry Page!

But I'll go with Larry Page, since Elon is too mainstream :P

I read a book called How Google Works by Erick Schmidt and he narrates some anecdotes from his days when he started working at Google that got my attention.

I like to consider myself as an introvert (at least most of the time) and so does Larry Page, so that may have also influenced in how I can relate to him.

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Adele Francois

I agree I think Elon is too mainstream lol, but that's a good pick. Definitely need to pick up that book!

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Anton Frattaroli • Edited

I'm not sure what I'd ask Linus Torvalds. It wouldn't really matter, his answers are almost always amusing.

Whenever Musk starts a rant on AI, I think of Linus' very sane and very amusing take on it in his Slashdot Q&A: gizmodo.com/linux-creator-linus-to...

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Musa Barighzaai

I would say Dan Abramov is my tech hero. He is what the JavaScript community needed. Dan4Prez.

I would ask him how he has time to balance both working on React and helping the community of JS devs...

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Jen Chan

Jessie Frazelle — what’s on your bookshelf?

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Kasey Speakman

I don't really have heroes, but there are people that have taught me a lot whom I have never met in person. Tech bloggers, conference speakers, historical giants of computer science. No questions really, just a big Thank You.

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Bob van Hoove

Same here. There's some people who I deeply respect for their contributions.

I like to name a few: Douglas Crockford for his lectures on javascript. Erik Meijer for bringing us LINQ and his radiant passion. The DEV.TOcrew for making this nice little/great place :)

But if I were to meet any of them I'd rather buy them a drink and say thanks.

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Nicho • Edited

For me it would be Steve Jobs and I would ask him why the iPad never got a calculator 😄
There is actually a funny story behind that (cultofmac.com/421893/why-the-ipad-...). But it's 2017 and the year is also almost over, so I would forward this question to Tim Cook and would highlight that they sell an iPad Pro version and call iOS "The world’s most advanced mobile operating system" (apple.com/ipad-pro/ios/). I mean c'mon! 😂
But to be more serious now, I would like to ask the engineering team, where they see Apple in the next 5-10 years and what they want to solve until then. The same question goes to the teams at Google and Amazon, I think all these people have a big impact on our daily lives, so their thoughts about the future could be very interesting 🙂

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Matty Stratton

One of the most amazing things about being a tech podcast host is getting to spend time asking your tech heroes questions - and sometimes these heroes turn into your friends!

I think my real tech hero lately is whoever runs the @SwiftOnSecurity twitter account.

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Jason C. McDonald

I'm blessed. I actually got to ask three of my tech heroes questions.

I wrote to both Guido van Rossum and Bjarne Stroustrup to ask for their advice regarding language design. Obviously, I saved their letters. Here's the pithiest answer from each:


Me: What are some problems with programming languages that you have not yet seen solved?

Stroustrup: Stating intent separately from implementation and providing optimal performance. We are making progress at this, but oh, so slowly.


Me: What mistakes do you see being made over and over in language design?

Rossum: If you find users are consistently confused by something, that's an opportunity for improving the language. Don't fall into the trap of thinking "oh, we need to document that better"!


I also wrote a letter to Donald Knuth, in which I asked: "What advice would you have to a young programmer in my position?"

I received a hand-written response on my letter a few weeks later. In it, he said...

At risk of over-promoting my own work, I think the best advice I can offer is to read my book "Literate Programming", then make sure your company uses CWEB!

Now, to be honest, I do not use CWEB - I looked at it and just about had a heart attack - but I did wind up integrating some of its ideas into my Commenting Showing Intent standard. "Literate Programming" is still on my "to read" list.

Anyhow, I have the full response framed on my office wall, because why not?

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Adele Francois

Those are some great questions!

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Herandy Santos

There's so many questions I would ask Satoru Iwata. Why did he leave so soon? Will I ever get to be as good as him in everything he set to achieve? What was his secret? I could go on and on forever, but it's just best to read and reread his stories and just give it a try to be as influential as this man was to the gaming industry in whichever part of the massive tech industry you set your foot into.

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Pratik Ambani • Edited

I'm a big fan of Joshua Bloch.

Who is he: Java Developer, having too many commits in JDK source libraries.

Q: Dude, how come you managed to write these much content in JDK libraries? Gimme direction... 😋

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User_name

Who: I'd choose Aaron Patterson.

Why: I stumbled upon a talk on Youtube, given by Aaron, in 2016 at BathRuby, and I loved it so much I watched most of his talks!
(Also you should follow him on Twitter. His puns are hilarious)
He is a part of the Rails and Ruby core teams-- which is so cool!

Highly recommend you watch one his talks!

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Israel García

I would go between Elon Musk and Carl Sagan, both of them are into the space tech stuff and I really would like to ask about their opinion about the current comercial programming scene vs space/rocket science applications

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Loxy • Edited

For me - jeffrey way is someone I consider to be responsible for the existence of my career. What I would ask him? Perhaps, how do you stay so highly motivated to the point of being consistently ahead of the curve?

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Lortnok2

I would ask Steve, where to get cheap child labor this days