Heroes of Tech

The people whose work I build on every day.

Linus Torvalds

Linux · Git

Created the Linux kernel in 1991 and still steers its development today. He also wrote Git in a couple of weeks in 2005, after a fallout over the tool the kernel had been using for version control.

Richard Stallman

GNU · Emacs · GPL

Founded the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation, and wrote GCC, Emacs, and GDB himself. Most of what people call Linux is really GNU — the compiler, C library, and core command-line tools — which is why he insists it be called GNU/Linux.

Dennis Ritchie

C · Unix

Created the C programming language and co-created Unix at Bell Labs. Nearly every operating system and language in use today descends from that work, and the book he co-wrote, K&R, taught generations how to program.

Ken Thompson

Unix · B · UTF-8

Co-created Unix and the B language, and later co-designed UTF-8 and Go. In his 1984 Turing Award lecture he unveiled the Trusting Trust attack — a compiler rigged to slip a backdoor into the login program and into future copies of itself — proving you can't fully trust code you didn't build yourself.

Guido van Rossum

Python

Created Python — the language this very site runs on — and guided it as its Benevolent Dictator For Life for nearly three decades before stepping back in 2018.

John Carmack

Doom · Quake

id Software co-founder who pioneered real-time 3D graphics in Doom and Quake, then open-sourced their engines. He later became CTO of Oculus, helping kick-start the modern virtual-reality era.