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Fernando Doglio
Fernando Doglio

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Who inspires you in the industry and why?

There are tons of devs out there, sharing their work on a daily basis, which ones get to you the most? Which ones have managed to reach you to the point that you see them share their progress and think to yourself: "damn, I gotta get my sh*t together and start making progress myself".?

Share the love and if they're part of this community, mention them in the comments :)

Top comments (6)

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deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy • Edited

This is perhaps a bit of strange answer, but I've always been fascinated by Terry Davis. It's definitely a sad story - Davis was schizophrenic, and his support system deteriorated over his lifetime. His interactions with the community were often combative and racist and when he died he was homeless.

However, the product that was his life's work is absolutely fascinating. He built TempleOS, entirely alone. Not only that, he created his own JITting C dialect first, used for system programming and shell interaction. So, we're talking a compiler, a kernel, a userspace. It's a multitasking OS, multicore, operates entirely in ring-0, with 8-bit graphics. He build both 2d and 3d graphics libraries for it, and went on to implement a full suite of applications for it, including a flight simulator.

This is a staggering undertaking. There's some fascinating engineering here, and a fascinating human behind it despite everything.

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Fernando Doglio

Nice, thanks for sharing! I didn't know about Terry, but it's an amazing piece of software and wonderful achievement!

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Ram Damera

Just to name a few: T.J. Halowaychuk, Douglas Wilson, Dominic Tarr, Jordan Harband and James Haliday. The most underrated persons that I just love.

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Fernando Doglio

Thanks for sharing! Any indication why you look up to them? It might help others understand if they want to follow them or not :)

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Ram Damera

These people work prominently on open-source Node packages that are used by millions of users. Unlike any other OSS developers they don't make a life of it. They have a day job and still make it possible to work. They could have backed-off of money since the dawn of Node popularity but they didn't. This video youtu.be/MO8hZlgK5zc (point made at 17:18) explains these economies.

P.S. I forgot to mention Feross

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Fernando Doglio

Thanks for sharing Stavro, I didn't know about either of them, but they sound like interesting people to follow. Thanks! :)