People I Read

This is a list of people that I like to read and follow up on, because I think they have good ideas and insights. Many of them are pioneers of certain technologies that have heavily influenced software development. If you haven't heard of them, you will find that for the most part, they are very google'able.

Martin Fowler - His site contains excellent and definitive articles on certain subjects like Inversion of Control. He is the author of many books, most notably, "UML Distilled" and "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code." If you want to learn how to refactor well, read his book. He works for ThoughtWorks, a company who's employees have brought us many great open source projects. MartinFolwer.com

Kent Beck - The creator of Extreme Programming itself. He also cowrote/ported the famous JUnit unit testing framework along with Eric Gamma (one of the "gang of four" authors). His book, "Extreme Programming Explained", is a must read for anybody interested in XP. A friend of mine often refers to something Kent Beck said: "Get it done, make it right, make it fast." Good advice for programming.

Paul Graham - A programmer, essayist, and painter. He is well known in the Lisp community, as he is the author of "On Lisp", "ANSI Common Lisp", and "Hackers & Painters." His essays are very intriguing and will usually get you in deep thought. His writings are also a great resource to read for anybody who is considering to start a company. He even owns a company that specializes in helping startups get established. My personal favorite essay of his is "What You'll Wish You'd Known." PaulGraham.com

Alan Kay - He is dubbed as the father of object oriented programming. If I come across anything that he is involved in, it is usually pretty amazing stuff. He's done R&D for companies such as Apple and Walt Disney. He is one of the creators of Squeak (Smalltalk programming environment), and is currently working on an interesting project called Croquet. His most recent endeavor that is making noise is the $100 laptop project. Really, there is too much stuff he has been a part of for me to list all of it out. He's got some great quotes, and my personal favorite is "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

Ron Jefferies - XP-Evangelist. He worked with Kent Beck on the Chrysler C3 project and is co-author of the book "Extreme Programming Installed." Ron has written other books as well and spoken at various "agile programming" events. He has written a whole lot of software and has made a lot of people a lot of money. XP Programming.com

Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas (The Pragmatic Programmers) - I've only read their books, and they are good, so that is all I really know of them. Their most popular book, a must read for any programmer, is "The Pragmatic Programmer." This book will give you excellent advice on how to become, well, pragmatic. They also wrote "Programming Ruby", which is the first and most read book on Ruby. Pragmatic Programmers

Ward Cunningham - The creator of wiki and FIT (integration testing framework). Microsoft hired him to come in and start their Patterns and Practices site, which is one of the best resources Microsoft has put out. He is an XP evangelist and works for the Eclipse Foundation. Ward's company

Dr. Tom Pittman - He is a professor that one of my friends had while in college. A lover of the old Macintosh systems, and will give you good reason why the operating systems of today just don't stack up against the early macs. He was actually referenced in a recent Dr. Dobbs magazine issue that stated that Dr. Pittman was one of the people involved in the microprocessor revolution. Dr. Pittman's site

Scott Hanselman - A good blog to read for any person who is interested in or doing .NET. Computer Zen