I am looking for good programming people to follow on Twitter. What are your suggestions?
Yeah that's what prompted me to ask the question.
John Nolan
2008-10-10 11:54:08
+31
A:
Even good programming people - such as Scott Hanselman and Phil Haack in the Windows/ .NET world - tend to post a lot of personal/ non programming stuff on twitter. I'd recommend choosing an RSS reader and following their blogs instead.
David Arno
2008-10-10 11:45:39
Agreed Jeff Atwood's is so full of YouTube and Rock Band links, that I won't click on his links in work.
John Nolan
2008-10-10 11:56:36
i agree, if you're purely looking for programming related stuff go for the RSS feeds since twitter has very low signal-to-noise ratio
jesal
2009-04-20 21:21:32
+16
A:
I follow these guys:
There is a comforting aspect in reading tweets of these people: you see that you're not the only one with seemingly trivial problems... ;-)
Edit: There is dvlprs.com, a site which shows live tweets from "celebrity" programmers.
splattne
2008-10-10 11:47:32
Surprised to see that @shanselman is not in the featured list on dvlprs.com
devcoder
2010-07-02 16:43:56
+1
A:
this is a nice list from Jeff Moser http://tinyurl.com/6jyoth
another list from Elijah Manor http://webdevdotnet.blogspot.com/2008/12/20-people-net-developers-should-follow.html
KeesDijk
2008-11-22 13:40:04
+9
A:
Jurgen Appelo recently created this list: Top 50 Twitterers to Follow for Developers.
Now perhaps somebody could help me with my question, what exactly is the point of Twitter?
Dan Dyer
2008-12-05 12:16:01
that's a pretty philosophical question. It's a site that performs a simple service very well, and people use it, presumably for a whole host of reasons. I use it to track my day.
Ben Aston
2008-12-05 13:28:09
Well IMHO, twitter is a site where you shout your public thoughts - useful or not. Most of the time others tweets doesn't make any sense to you.
devcoder
2010-07-02 16:47:08
It's like a globally visible chat room, except you can only see chatter from people you're following rather than having to opt out by ignoring them. I use it just like I would IRC, except I make note that anyone could be reading my tweets so I'm not quite as um... flippant with my language/thoughts.
BenAlabaster
2010-09-13 20:38:50
+1
A:
I twitter, mostly about my development of JUnitMax. My creatively named account: http://twitter.com/KentBeck
Kent Beck
2008-12-29 21:32:00
Steven: http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/junitmax/subscribe.html "an Eclipse plug-in to improve developer test, is in paid beta test."
dbr
2009-08-31 00:03:04
JUnit Max was a continuous testing plugin for Eclipse. After each file save it ran all the tests for the affected project (and all its dependent projects), ran them most-likely-to-fail-first, and showed the results in the source code. While a great tool to use for me, it was a business failure and I cancelled it after seven months.
Kent Beck
2009-10-15 16:15:12
@[Kent Beck]: perhaps a market survey might be in order for your next product? I save files a LOT and my unit tests take a few minutes to run... ;-)
Steven A. Lowe
2010-02-01 06:10:34
A:
i just started on twitter, and am still getting the hang of how not to be boring on it ;-)
and of course, it is mandatory to follow Jon Skeet, even though he doesn't say much
Steven A. Lowe
2009-01-06 19:20:41
A:
Most sites will have a twitter account or bot that posts links to their site when a new article is posted, some of these can be quite nice to follow. I even wrote a program to aggregate RSS feeds and then tweet when new articles arrived, case in point @stackalert.
Teifion
2009-04-22 09:48:13
+2
A:
#followfriday :-)
@codemonkeyism @codinghorror @dnene @elijahmanor @gvanrossum @jeffbarr @jeffpatton @jurgenappelo @mfeathers @robdiana @shanselman @spolsky @testobsessed @unclebobmartin
This is not a complete list of programmers and software experts I follow, but they are all well known and I hope this list is helpful to you.
I think following these people on Twitter and following their blogs via RSS don't need to be mutually exclusive activities; they can complement each other nicely.
azheglov
2009-05-22 19:34:05
Okay. May be you don't like all of them. Follow catswhocode, codepo8, mager. They are all good.
vinaynag
2009-08-28 08:01:35
+7
A:
A long-ish list of people I enjoy, in no particular order:
- Sam Stephenson, programmer at 37signals and creator of Prototype.
- Marco Arment, developer of Tumblr and Instapaper.
- Joe Hewitt, engineer at Facebook, developer of the Facebook iPhone app, and best-known for his work on Firefox.
- Dion Almaer, engineer at Mozilla and co-author of Ajaxian.
- Joe Stump, former tech lead at Digg.
- Francisco Tolmasky, founder of 280 North.
- Aza Raskin, head of UX at Mozilla Labs.
- Todd Ditchendorf, Mac software developer.
- John Resig, creator of jQuery.
- Jeff Cohen, Rails dev.
- Dustin Diaz, engineer at Twitter, and also a kick-ass photographer.
- Rands, engineer at Apple.
- Michael Tsai, Mac software developer.
- Daniel Jalkut, Mac software developer.
- Ian Hickson, author of the HTML 5 spec.
Guillermo Esteves
2009-08-30 23:52:46
+1
A:
It depends what you're looking for - if you're after .NET I've got a whole list of people I follow - some 800 of them. I find that the most consistently useful people - forgetting the "celebrities" who are just on the list for their own sake, because they have podcasts or run some company or other. I find that the celebrities don't usually tweet much that's useful, most of them just talk amongst themselves about useless rubbish most of the time and never respond to you if you tweet them anyway - not to say they're not great people, but if you want high signal/noise ratio, follow their blogs. That said, there's a bunch of great people you could follow that will help, and not all of them are celebrities, but they're all great people and really know their stuff:
- @JonSkeet is definitely one of the most helpful. Usually responds if you tweet to him. Microsoft MVP.
- @MladenPrajdic is always good, not a "celebrity", but definitely a solid developer. Always seems to have an answer if you get stuck.
- @Cammerman is solid. Great for theoretical debate.
- @LynnBeighley - tech author, always responds when you tweet to her, she's awesome.
- @elijahmanor - always posts stacks of really useful links.
- @mrpaladin - like Elijah, always posts stacks of really interesting stuff. Although, if you follow both of these guys, you can kiss almost 100% of your time goodbye if you're not careful. The information's too interesting not to read, and there's too much to take it all in.
- @sbohlen - Cofounder of ALT.NET, and contrary to the stereotype of ALT.NETters being jerks, he's a pretty nice guy. Microsoft MVP.
- @SyntaxC4 - Organizer of coffee & code in the GTA/Guelph region. Great guy, super helpful, Microsoft Azure guru.
- @ScottGu - Doesn't post much at all, never responds to any of your tweets, but he's the big cheese for the .NET framework.
- @Scobleizer - Robert Scoble, tech news. Tons of interesting material, he hasn't (so far) responded to any of my tweets, but he seems to engage with his followers. Perhaps he just thinks I'm an idiot :P
I've also got some lists set up:
I've got a heap more, but I'd be here all day. 99% of the people I follow are developers, so if you want more inspiration, just go and rip off the list of people I follow ;)
A really easy way to keep a tab on useful people to follow is to have a running search in something like TweetDeck. I've got a column set up for "asp.net" OR "vb.net" OR csharp OR "c-sharp" OR VisualStudio OR "Visual Studio" OR MSDN OR "VS2010" OR "VS2008" As you see people's names come up, if the information is consistently relevant, you can start following them.
And of course, in my mind, the absolute most important person to follow is me. Don't crush my ego by not following me, my therapy bills are killing me already ;)
BenAlabaster
2010-09-13 20:24:46
A:
If you're into graphics/game development and @ID_AA_Carmack (John Carmack of id software fame) is a fascinating one to follow.
Toji
2010-09-13 20:41:28