engineering characters

below are a list of engineering characters. they’re characters in the sense that they’ve intrigued, inspired, or otherwise stuck out to me, and generally, are people i have never met.

• philip guo - guo’s research on human computer interaction, and and how we learn to use technology is fascinating, and he has made some neat tools around learning different software related things - a bunch for python. also his lectures just make him seem like a really nice smart humble guy.

• drew devault - drew’s commitment to FOSS (free and open source software) is admirable, and sometimes intimidating. he created sourcehut, of which i am a contributor and proudly paying supporter. i host this memex on sourcehut, as well as pretty much all my other code.

• devine lu linvega - devine is a curious soul who inspires me like few others. i am thankful to have met him on the internet after getting interested in his project orca. for orca, i made a tutorial/sandbox site learn-orca after becoming intrigued. later, i did the same for one of his uxn project - learn-uxn. the technology and philosophy that accompany his online persona are worth checking out - also see solarpunk and permacomputing.

• dan luu - i enjoy his thoughts on technology, computer science, industry, learning, and writing. more generally though reading dan’s post is always fun, and he is humble and funny.

• julia evans - i love julias comics. i learn something every time i read them as well! julia reminds me to stay curious and keep learning and also not be intimidated by things that feel insurmountable. reading some of her zines reminds me that troubleshooting and debugging and investing in tooling around that is time well spent.

• andrew kelley - andrew kelley is creating the zig language. if you get a chance to watch some of his videos on how and why zig is the way it is, its inspiring to see such someone setting their sights on longevity, security, maintainability, and also being capable and dedicated enough to make it happen. i haven’t learned zig yet but the more i read/watch from andrew, i feel like its just a matter of time until i at least try to on some level.

• richard littauer - richard littauer is great - and one of the few people i know who studied computational linguistics before moving into software and engineering. his work is wide ranging and worth exploring - i appreciate reading about his journey into open source and his work with open source collective

• xe iaso - the depth of xe’s blog posts into somewhat obscure and interesting parts of technology is remarkable. i also appreciate their honesty and ability to be self aware, as well as candidness around their career and plurality.

• amos wenger - rust focused didactic long form conversational blog posts. these take a long time to read but they’re incredibly fun to go through. i learn something interesting everytime i read amos’s posts and particularly enjoyed his video on how he learned to love build systems

• justine tunney - justine’s projects are incredibly inspiring to me. many of them deal with very low level application binary interfaces in unixes. i highly recommend looking through her projects: https://justine.lol/ - some of the more interesting ones to me include redbean, a single file web server, cosmopolitican libc - an alternative libc, and αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε - an absolutely mind blowing hack to make executables work on many different operating systems with the same source code by (ab)using the linux ABI and quirks of the thompson shell.

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