'Top 10' is a convenient label. It's more about the answer to the question 'who are the most respected experts in X within the Y', and maybe even make X be inst

'Top 10' is a convenient label. It's more about the answer to the question 'who are the most respected experts in X within the Y', and maybe even make X be instead 'X using Z'. Several careers having been made by being known as a leader using a particular technology, or a co-creator of the technology from the beginning, though it always comes with other things to back it up as well: * Tim Berners-Lee - the web, W3C * Peter Saint-Andre - XMPP, messaging RFCs * DHH - Ruby on Rails * Martin Fowler - Design Patterns ..and many more. Yes, getting to the Tim Berners-Lee level of industry recognition is unreasonable to expect for most. But I think it is reasonable to think that this is doable, with the depth of the expertise niche needed to be outstanding being inversely proportional to the talent of the expert. One person might have an expertise niche of messaging, while another has RabbitMQ as their main niche. Both are viable to base a living off of.