Looking over the shoulders of giants

You may have noticed the pace of change in the world is accelerating, especially in technology.

It is almost impossible, at any given time, to pinpoint what is the best technology for any given application. Even asking the question leads to other questions.

• Full stack monolith or microservices?
• Framework - no framework?
• Javascript, Typescript, Noscript?

As a technology consultant, I've had to come up my own set of rules to allow to me to make since of the technology landscape. To do this, my number one tool is looking over the shoulders of giants.

The Giants

Here are some of the developers I like to follow

• Rich Harris - The developer of Svelte.
  • Rich sees things others miss. Developing Svelte 3, he turned things upside down, questioning the need for the virtual dom, considered sacrosanct by many. To avoid it and the runtime needed to be delivered to the app and interpreted before the framework could be used, he built his own compiler.
  • Still, his greatest asset is his ability to communicate. Not a surprise, maybe, since he is an editor (that's right an editor, Svelte is his 'side project') at the NY Times (2019). He sees the client-side ecosystem (a tsunami of continuous change) with breath and depth and clarity. He is able to communicate his ideas, via metaphors and parables and in code. He truly is a renaissance developer and one of the most humble and engaging speakers I've ever witnessed.
• David Heinemeier Hansson - the developer of Rails
  • For me Rails was a revelation. Even today, when I get a chance to work in the framework, it feels like I'm slipping into a well used glove. Everything is in the right place. The development friction encountered in other tools is gone. David just gets the developer experience. In a framework, that is where the value is.
• Yehuda Katz - Ember, Bundler more ...
  • Core contributer to Rails, especially in the (bumpy) transition from Rails 2 to 3. Yehuda is practically omnipresent in the technology landscape.
• Jeremy Ashkenas - Coffeescript
  • There is something about a person/developer that says to himself one day, "you know this javascript is ok, but I can make it better by writing my own transpiler."
  • Given the rise of Typescript, I've kind of moved on from Coffeescript but I think Jeremy has something insanely great up his sleeve.
• Jose Valim For awhile, a core (and vital IMO) contributor to Rails now developing Elixir
  • Jose is just one of the guys who I simply can not grasp the breadth of their knowledge
• John Resig Jquery. Capability tree based on capability - not browser/version. Jquery mobile.

Many others ...