Ask HN: Who are the Alpha Geeks you follow?
Tim O'Reilly once famously claimed that by following the "alpha geeks" you can see what's going to be a significant technology down the road. Chad Fowler describes them as, "... those supernerds who are always on the bloodiest tip of the bleeding edge, at least in their hobby activities." This probably applies to quite a few HN readers.
So who are you following and why?
I'll go first: Rich Hickey, for his amazing work bringing a Lisp to the JVM and moving STM concepts deeper into practice. I especially enjoyed his talks on InfoQ about state and identity.
On a side note, if you agree with PG in his Great Hackers essay that, "Even hackers can't tell [who is a great hacker]," then the Alpha Geek concept becomes moot since you can't actually detect the true alpha geek. There is the possibility, of course, that perception becomes reality.
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Brad Fitzpatrick (http://brad.livejournal.com/) - creator of LiveJournal and Danga, now at Google working on PubSubHubbub, the Social Graph API, etc.
John Resig (http://ejohn.org/, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jeresig) - jQuery, Mozilla, lots of other JavaScript and browser stuff.
Paul Bucheit (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=paul) - creator of GMail and FriendFeed, now at Facebook.
Ryan Tomayko (http://tomayko.com) - Ruby, Sinatra, now working at GitHub, has an excellent linkblog.
Simon Willison (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonw) - Django, Python, also has an excellent linkblog.
Leslie Orchard (http://decafbad.com/) - Previously at Delicious/Yahoo, wrote books on JavaScript, Dojo, RSS, now at Mozilla. Follow his bookmarks at: http://delicious.com/deusx
Mark Pilgrim (http://diveintomark.org/) - Atom, HTML5, Linux, Python, Greasemonkey, formerly at IBM, now at Google. Bookmarks at: http://delicious.com/wearehugh
John Gruber (http://daringfireball.net/) - Apple news and punditry, linkblog.
Sam Ruby (http://intertwingly.net/blog/) - Atom, Python, Ruby, Rails, XML, HTML5, SVG. Read what he reads at: http://planet.intertwingly.net/
Kevin Kelly (http://kk.org/kk/) - Whole Earth Catalog, WELL, Wired magazine, Cool Tools, various books. Compared to the rest of my list, KK does much more big-picture thinking about technology and society.
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...and some of the not-so-loud alpha geeks who I wish posted more (but not really, they probably get more done if they're not blogging all the time):
Dustin Sallings (http://dustin.github.com/, http://delicious.com/dustin) - memcached, Python, Twisted, Erlang, Java, C, etc, etc, etc.
Tom Preston-Werner (http://tom.preston-werner.com/) - GitHub, Ruby, God, Jekyll.
Richard Johnes (http://www.metabrew.com/) - Last.fm, Playdar, Erlang.
http://timetobleed.com/
Gilad Bracha, and the newspeak crew at newspeaklanguage.org
Terry Jones, at fluidinfo.com