For me what's impressive is when someone builds a product that becomes so successful it takes on a life of its own. Examples: (redis) antirez (redis) - Beautif

For me what's impressive is when someone builds a product that becomes so successful it takes on a life of its own. Examples: (redis) antirez (redis) - Beautiful product, elegant codebase, thriving ecosystem. Amazing work for one person (obviously many more people are involved now, but just getting a product to the point of creating an ecosystem is impressive) (docker) shykes, jpetazzo and the rest of the docker team (react) Pete Hunt, one of the original creators of react (I'm sure others were involved, but I met this guy years back in SF, he probably doesn't remember - but he came off as quite smart) (ffmpeg, qemu) fabrice bellard - Mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the guy is an absolute beast. (hashicorp) Mitchell Hasimoto - The best example of a 10x programmer I've ever seen, but also great product sense. Every hashicorp product is well built and it's emerging as a nice ecosystem. (bitcoin) Satoshi - come on. Obviously. (ethereum) Vitalik Buterin - I was skeptical of ethereum at first but I've been really impressed by Vitalik and the team's dedication - they did a great job launching a product and building an ecosystem around it (<insert criticisms of solidity>) (Tor) Roger Dingledine and Paul Syverson - Tor. Visionary, world changing product and a strong community. (javascript) brandon eich - Original creator of JS (go) Rob Pike - go (other languages): DHH (rails), Yukihiro Matsumoto (ruby), Guido von Rossum (python), Resmus Lerdorf (PHP, believe it or not) (the obvious): Linus Torvalds (linux, git), John Carmack (doom, quake, oculus) (the kings): Zuckerberg, Gates (the graybeards): kernighan, ritchie, thompson, knuth (games): notch (minecraft), Sid Meier (civ)