Who inspires you and why?

The whole dev.to community!

Why?
Because every single one has something to say that can be valuable for me in some aspects. Like this discussion is valuable because I will find many new interesting people mentioned later in the comments who I can look into an learn something new or enhance my mindset :)

Tim Ferriss inspires me a lot. After reading a couple of his books, I am listening to his podcasts and he has very interesting guests to all kinds of topics.

Also Max Gotzler regarding healthy lifestyle, fitness and biohacking. After reading his book, I also started listening to his podcasts and reading his blog. He really changed my mind regarding my sport and my awareness of my body.

I feel more inspired by the dev community (as in "all devs", not just here) as a whole rather than by specific individuals.

I feel like it's easier to relate to communities and their members compared to some outstanding individuals. I can take Elon Musk as an example. That guy could clearly qualify as one of my inspirations but it feels like an unrealistic and unachievable standard too: the guy's ambitions, genius and achievements are way out of my league.

Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie for unix, c, go,

Claude Shannon for information theory,

Isaac Asimov for pushing what I believe to be theoretically possible in computer science.

Larry Wall for perl and taking elegant code hacks to the next level lol

Bram Moolenaar for Vim keybindings which have saved me hours of my life when it comes to editing code

Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Richard Stallman. Great style, work eithic and significant contributions to modern software development in general. Managers/CEOs get far too much credit. It's developers, testers, technical writers, etc. that add value.

The people who founded the technology we use today. Those individuals who stood up late, challenged themselves, and broke the rules to come up with better ways to control tech. People like Breden Eich, Tim Burners Lee, Steve Wozniak, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Grace Hopper, John Carmack, Kevin Mitnick, Bill Gates, Alan Turning, and Ada Lovelace.

I could go on :)

If we talks about devs these are:
Mark Seeman as he's the guy who became really proficient in OO-design so when he stated that FP can solve some OO-shortcomings he sounded like really credible guy. He pushed me to learn F#
Vladimir Agafonkin as he's not only author of maps library which I use in one of my pet projects but also a singer and guitarist in Обійми Дощу. I mean I knew quite a lot of devs who have music as hobby but it's the first time I had to know the dev who is really successful musician. He inspired me to devote some of my time to creative activities too.

Elon Musk, Phil Knight and many others.
Their passion for the work is unbelievable and and they push themselvs almost harder than most of the people 😊

Theo de Raadt, because he keeps the flame of meritocracy alive.