5 ms·

It is an amazing time for programmers

137 points by jlundberg 4mo ago

mickyarun 4mo ago
[dead]
jlundberg 4mo ago
I wrote an email to Mike Pall once and got a very refreshing reply. Daniel Stenberg is not on the list but he is also a very active programmer on social media like LinkedIn that you can interact with.
- abc123abc123 4mo ago
  This is the way! Email is great. I've written to many famous people, and from time to time, gotten replies. I've sold SaaS and consultants for 100s of k of USD, all through emails. It's an elegant weapon, for a more civilized age.
  - titanomachy 4mo ago
    Yeah, surely this will come to an end soon. My personal email is full of AI-generated recruiter email. I still read all my email (well, not the Updates or Promotions tabs in gmail), but I 'm not in any way famous.
    - abc123abc123 4mo ago
      Pro tip! Don't share your email with recruiters, and you won't get AI-generated recruiter emails. I get about 1 spam message every 2 months or so.
ainiriand 4mo ago
When I started working in software I took a job in a city different than mine, so I had to go there to live alone, and the job was by myself in a room with no windows. Most lonely 2 years of my life.
- embedding-shape 4mo ago
  On the other hand, I wasn't working in software but after I moved country, I managed to get my foot into the industry, and it opened up my social life like nothing else, as finally I had people around me who also like software development, something I never experienced for ~18 years or so until I did a drastic move.
- sshine 4mo ago
  I rejected a job like that early in my career.
- OnionBlender 4mo ago
  This is my life. I drive to the office 5 days per week to sit in a tiny windowless room. I have meetings with Europe in the morning and meetings with India in the evening. The rare time I need to talk to someone in the US, they are in a different building so we talk through Teams.
chrishill89 4mo ago
I wrote an essay and sent it to Chomsky once. He wrote back that he probably won't have time to read it. Some years ago I realized that I can just start sending emails to an OSS mailing list. Without introduction just starting to post as if I belonged there. I had already made some grammar fixes more than five years before that but I started to comment and critique submissions. And submitting my own patches. Now checking the mailing list is daily habit. Unfortunately I didn't have time to post the second version of a submission on the bus today (another documentation fix). People, and especially in my culture, are very good at staying out of places where they do not belong through self-policing alone. Unfortunately to the point where at least I do get stuck in narrow patterns and never even consider certain opportunities.
- senda 4mo ago
  Chomsky was always amazing for this.
  - justgoodfriends 4mo ago
    Yet he always found the time to read and respond to his bestie Jeff Epstein.
    - chrishill89 4mo ago
      Absolutely. You didn't have to make an account to remind me, at least. His relationship with Epstein was shameful and there is no excuse for it.
Dotcomico 4mo ago
[flagged]
- jlundberg 4mo ago
  Indeed! Got any advice for people who want to go for it and write their first tweet or email?
jdw64 4mo ago
I also want to communicate with someone and have programming conversations. There's no one around me to talk about programming with. I'm the only programmer around. Aside from AI and books, I sometimes want to talk with a real person.
- 8-prime 4mo ago
  I found great enjoyment from https://late.sh/ https://late.sh/. I'm not as active as I would like to be but the small community is still active enought that there is basically always someone around to chat with.
  - jdw64 4mo ago
    thanks!
    - 8-prime 4mo ago
      If you do end up joining feel free to dm me. same user as here.
      - jdw64 4mo ago
        I'm not sure about the DM feature, but I like this more than I thought. I don't have any memories of the TUI environment (most of my memories are from IRC), but it has an IRC feel to it, so I like it
  - 0fflineuser 4mo ago
    I am actually blown away by how good it is. Both the features, the UI, everything. wow.
  - Ocha 4mo ago
    Can’t connect unfortunately. debug1: Sending environment. debug1: channel 2: setting env LANG = "en_US.UTF-8" debug2: channel 2: request env confirm 0 debug1: channel 2: setting env LC_TERMINAL = "iTerm2" debug2: channel 2: request env confirm 0 debug1: channel 2: setting env LC_TERMINAL_VERSION = "3.6.10" debug2: channel 2: request env confirm 0 debug1: channel 2: setting env LC_ALL = "en_US.UTF-8" debug2: channel 2: request env confirm 0 debug2: channel 2: request shell confirm 1 debug2: channel_input_open_confirmation: channel 2: callback done debug2: channel 2: open confirm rwindow 8388608 rmax 32768 debug1: mux_client_request_session: master session id: 2 debug2: channel_input_status_confirm: type 99 id 2 debug2: PTY allocation request accepted on channel 2 Connection to late.sh closed by remote host.
nkjoep 4mo ago
Amazing how these people are even reachable via phone, their numbers are pretty easy to find.
- jlundberg 4mo ago
  Yep, the biggest blocker for a good conversation is people simply not writing an email or trying to make that call. Which is why I wrote this. Is the same at conferences: one of the best things you can do is to fo and talk to the person holding the lecture. They usually appreciate it very much. You don’t need to be famous to do that.
  - CuriouslyC 4mo ago
    Most famous people are really busy though. Even people who have given me engaged replies often took a month or more to write back.
rTX5CMRXIfFG 4mo ago
I constantly wonder what life was like, then, for the earliest inventors, scientists, and curious minds in our history. Surely they didn't have many people to bounce ideas or build things with. How did they find the strength to persist in their interests? These days, it's far easier to quit when you cannot find community since you can distract yourself with many kinds of entertainment instead; and with bleak economic outlook everywhere, the very act of persistence itself can feel rather pointless.
- johngossman 4mo ago
  They wrote a lot of letters to each other. That's effectively how the Royal Society started, as the formalization of a network of letter writers
- Leptonmaniac 4mo ago
  I would say that a big part of research in Ye Old Days was either your local peers and colleagues but especially it was exchanging letters with the known Big Names in their respective fields. It is not without reason that nowadays that correspondence between researchers is a great source of insight.
- gobdovan 4mo ago
  They did have immense networks and were constantly communicating with one another. In On the Origin of Species, I was amazed how Darwin basically knew all the top breeders and naturists form South America, Arab Gulf, Oceania, which he mentions by name. He mentions his peers from the first page in the introduction and the correspondence and responses he got from them. There's not many geniuses without an ecosystem around them that produced them. And even if there are, how would we know about them if they weren't well connected enough to start mattering?
  - delis-thumbs-7e 4mo ago
    Famously Leibniz was a genious comparable to Newton, but we have only recently started to learn the scope of his thinking and research, since most of it was left unpublished.
charcircuit 4mo ago
Why stop at these people. You might as well reach out to Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Jansen Huang. There's more to life than tech companies. Why not reach out to the president. It takes less effort than you might think to reach out to anyone in the world. It is truly a small place.
- PaulRobinson 4mo ago
  If you email a CEO or President, you're not emailing them. You're emailing a team of EAs who are filtering for them. Their fame leads to a lot of problems in the inbox: begging letters, death threats, and irrelevant noise more than you can imagine. They also don't know much that you can probably make use of. They might think they do, and you might think they do, but they got there mostly through knowing how to talk to boards and investors, not by being able to engage deeply in expertise that is applicable to most people looking to make their way in the World - and if becoming a CEO of a major tech firm or President is the thing you need the help with, you probably know them or people like them already. I've met quite a few famous people in tech over the years, particularly open source, and have had some short and some long conversations with many of them. I've found most people pretty approachable. I also know through another side of my life quite a few people in the media and am an acquaintance of someone who is a household name in the UK. Through him, I've met famous sports people, writers, actors, etc., and through that and other networks I know people who have worked behind the scenes on major TV and theatre shows who have met hundreds of famous people. The one thing that unifies all of them is obvious, but seemingly lost on a lot of people who "other" those whose names are known to them despite never meeting them: they're all just human. They're not "other", they're us. Including everyone you see on TV, everyone you have read about in magazines, everyone you see on a stage. They have to put up with being recognised and people dealing with them in strange ways (how would you really deal with a stranger asking for a selfie while you were eating dinner with your family in a restaurant?), but they still do all the things you and I do. As the old saying goes, they all have to put their trousers on one leg at a time in the morning. I'd definitely encourage people to seek out experts (not just "famous people" unless those people are famous for expertise), and engage them as you'd want to be engaged about your expertise. You'll find most people will be approachable. But emailing that specific list of people is unlikely going to get you much beyond a template reply from one of their army of assistants.
psychoslave 4mo ago
One should go for it if they enjoy it, yes. On the other hand, life and work is not meant to be spent in full time worldwide interaction either. If someone want to interact with people like Linus Torvalds, they should be aware that in his case he publicly admitted the way he interacted with other was toxic[1]. To be clear, it’s no personal attack against him, it’s about the kind of interaction that can and does occur with largely celebrated figures in general. If anything at least in that case there is some recognition of the issue, though fair credit should probably given also to all people beyond the scene who certainly made tremendous effort for this to happen. And things like popular micro-blogging platforms are notoriously known to cause interaction going toxic[2]. Just because something is possible doesn’t mean its a nice path to thrive for everybody. To each their own judgment, but at least consider the tradeoffs. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/after-years-of-abusive-e-mails-the-creator-of-linux-steps-aside https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/after-years-of-ab... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07229-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07229-y
- jlundberg 4mo ago
  Yeah, it’s not about spamming people but overcoming the imposter syndrome. Learning to find this balance of not being annoying is probably easiest by trying to make relevant comments on someones tweet. And the response back will give you an energy boost! :) These people are much more approachable than people generally believe.
- rramadass 4mo ago
  I am not sure why people keep picking on Linus Torvalds. If anything Linus has been extremely patient and accommodating of the thousands of people who do no homework w.r.t. technical subjects before contacting him, or if experienced, make inexcusable (at their level) blunders. If you approach an expert, you need to be clear in your communication, know the subject you are talking about and in general be aware that experts find trivialities aggravating and are not obliged to suffer your ignorance.
gbkgbk 4mo ago
[flagged]
mnmnmn 4mo ago
[dead]
deadbabe 4mo ago
Will there ever be any more “legendary” programmers ever again now with the rise of AI basically making any coding accomplishments unimpressive?
- krapp 4mo ago
  Show me the AI generated code that puts the work of these people to shame. There probably won't be any more "legendary" programmers in the future. Not because AI is qualitatively superior but because the incentives of capitalism will force us all to accept the mediocrity of AI generated software and because the lack of opportunities and loss of knowledge created by mass deskilling will make education and community impossible.
  - deadbabe 4mo ago
    I guess the only “legendary” programmers would be independently wealthy millionaires and billionaires who code for fun. But no one will truly know they are even legendary because no one will care about code the same way.
cpfohl 4mo ago
Along similar lines: many of your favorite authors, musicians, and creators have public email addresses and seem to love getting emails. I’ve started writing notes with my kids to their favorite authors with ideas and always a thank you note. I’ve gotten replies from authors on NYT best sellers lists, musicians, and more. People like to be appreciated.
- CuriouslyC 4mo ago
  Ironically, I've found the best way to engage with creators is their YouTube channels. They're incentivized to engage by the algorithm, so if you can land a thoughtful comment early so they don't have to wade through 500 comments to see it the odds you'll get a short reply or a heart are pretty good.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- anotherevan 4mo ago
  I know some authors in particular never, ever want to be sent story ideas. The potential of being accused of or sued for plagiarism down the track for something even vaguely similar is non-zero.
  - cpfohl 4mo ago
    Most of our ideas are silly puns about the character names ;).
shevy-java 4mo ago
> Take the opportunity to send one of them an email or tweet. But ... why? I don't understand why I should write an email to Linus. Or Phil. Or Pete. Or Joe. I can barely keep up with the influx of existing emails as-is. Do I really want to extend to this and have to read through even MORE emails now?!
- jlundberg 4mo ago
  Relevant critique of this article. I should probably have elaborated more on WHY one should dare to do that and HOW you can that in a respectful and mutual way. How to increase the signal and not the noise. Sending an email without any clear purpose is not something I would encourge. But a highly thoughtful email about some of their works or question you have about a recent piece of code is probably appreciated. Genuine conversation. The easiest way to start your journey towards overcoming the imposter syndrome while not burdening someone is to reply to a recent tweet. If you have something relevant to say that is. But you probably do: more often than not.
krapp 4mo ago
This seems to be a submarine advertisement for a telephony API startup. It seems like it's been around for a few years so it probably isn't vibe-coded, but I do wonder if even small services like this will inevitably be gobbled up by AI. Like I know it probably isn't the case but I've become so jaded now that I'm looking at their teams page and wonder if these are even real people. Yes it's an amazing time for programmers but only in a "twilight of the gods" sense. The time for community passed about a decade ago, before Twitter turned into a Nazi bar and everything went entirely to shit. There's a little bit left but it's dying fast. Why would any of these people want to waste their time talking to the community that wants to assimilate their work and replace it with the mediocre shit dribbled from a Claude prompt? These people don't need your emails, they're probably already deluged with bots as it is.
- jlundberg 4mo ago
  Author here. Actually wrote the draft on this in January but last week finally got enough time to complete this with proper project links etc. We are certainly real people, except for one of the faces on our /support page who’s signature we use when replying to particularly aggressive fraudsters (to avoid feeling personally offended). The service might look easy on the surface, but getting all required infrastructure in place here in Europe is hard and the telecom world is surprisingly complex. ”I am jealous at you guys: backend services still has a future” a coder friend told me today at lunch. On topic, I obviously don’t think the community train has passed. Especially on meetups I see a lot of genuine connections between programmers being made. Threads, the app, has recently been the most relevant place for me to casually chat with other programmers. I don’t vouch for people to spam: but to overcome their imposter syndrome and dare to talk about coding with fellow programmers. Even the legends. And they often invite for conversations: wether it’s a comment field, pull request or tweet.
austin-cheney 4mo ago
Quite the gap. The legends the article talks about are legends because they either started a project that blew up in popularity and/or solved a demanded problem with original code. For most people writing software for a living that is gone. Its been gone since I started writing software 20 years ago. The goal post has moved. Its no longer about solving any problem. Its about hiring. The distinction is massive. Most of the people doing this work will never encounter an important problem to solve or write original code. Instead they will use tools and modify templates. There is still some troubleshooting there, but no originality. Its like being a plumber. Plumbers still make good money, but they aren't engineers. Now, with AI being pushed on everybody even becoming something like a plumber is becoming a distant gap for the next generation. The most clear exception are hobbyists, which has always been there as an exception through my years writing software. The only real distinction between most of these hobbyists and the legends is obscurity. The very real distinction between the hobbyists and less original professional is time spent practicing.
- laughing_man 4mo ago
  As my brother said once with exasperation: "I got into this business to write code, and now I'm just an integrator."
  - amelius 4mo ago
    integrator -> plumber
    - brookst 4mo ago
      If you choose that direction, yes. But you can also choose integrator -> CPO.
    - raffael_de 4mo ago
      personally I don't find this particularly unappealing and have often referred to myself as some sort of plumber. plumbing is all about connecting standardized interfaces (threads) and then some improvisation. in IT the amount of improvisation is higher due to less standardized interfaces and interfaces are more complex. but the analogy works and I enjoy thinking about how to make interfaces exchange information efficiently.
foobarbecue 4mo ago
Wow, I was always amazed by Andrew Tridgill's prolific contributions to ardupilot / mavlink when I did some minor work on those. Had no idea he was behind rsync and samba.
Rekindle8090 4mo ago
[dead]
whack 4mo ago
Imagine being Andrew Tridgell and watching your inbox blow up today with thousands of emails from complete strangers, all just saying hi and wanting to casually chat with you. He's probably scratching his head right now and wondering what is going on
- jlundberg 4mo ago
  Would probably sth memoreable and positive for him :) I doubt he’ll get more than a handful.
CuriouslyC 4mo ago
It's not a great time to be a programmer, it's a great time to be a marketer that can program passably. While 10x programmers are getting ignored on social media, you can use your marketing skills to hype your half baked project into a few thousand GitHub stars, then into investment from a VC. The exception is game programmers. With AI/engines, making games has never been easier, Steam takes a lot of the guesswork out of packaging/release, and the moat in games is taste/refinement which is very AI resistant.
- FrayedKnot 4mo ago
  Damn, sounds like you can make some easy money if you teamed up with a guy who is really good at marketing then, or taught yourself after market.
  - simbosambo 4mo ago
    [dead]
rramadass 4mo ago
I want only one thing from the above list; Somebody sit with Fabrice Bellard and pick his brain on how he thinks, how he organizes projects, how he studies so many different domains, how he implements them, views on work-life balance etc. etc. Basically i want a brain dump of Fabrice Bellard.
- jlundberg 4mo ago
  I would certainly read that reply or even better the book! That’s actually what I asked Mike Pall to do regarding JIT. He was reluctany and probably thinks too little of his teaching ability.. but that book would be awesome for future generations of compiler folks to read! Back to Bellard, maybe a good first approach is to ping one of his co-authors like the person he made QuickJS with.
alf42red 4mo ago
I think it's great that you can still follow people like Lawrence Paulson and Moshe Vardi. It's not only a great time for programmers but also for computer scientists. Platforms like LinkedIn make it easy to share a quick observation or question, and occasionally getting a reaction from leading researchers is one of the things that keeps me interested in the field.
- jlundberg 4mo ago
  Very much this. Especially Daniel Stenberg or for Sweden more locally famous coders like Christian Landgren are very approachable on LinkedIn. Makes for an intresting conversation and you can learn a lot by posting a well thought comment :)
leetgent 4mo ago
Not intending to nitpick, but it's interesting that Chris Lattner is listed simply as the creator of Swift. I would have thought his work on LLVM and Mojo would have been at least as well known.
Floppyrom 4mo ago
Look mom, no hands!

137 points by jlundberg 4mo ago

[dead]

I wrote an email to Mike Pall once and got a very refreshing reply. Daniel Stenberg is not on the list but he is also a very active programmer on social media like LinkedIn that you can interact with.

abc123abc123 4mo ago
This is the way! Email is great. I've written to many famous people, and from time to time, gotten replies. I've sold SaaS and consultants for 100s of k of USD, all through emails. It's an elegant weapon, for a more civilized age.
- titanomachy 4mo ago
  Yeah, surely this will come to an end soon. My personal email is full of AI-generated recruiter email. I still read all my email (well, not the Updates or Promotions tabs in gmail), but I 'm not in any way famous.
  - abc123abc123 4mo ago
    Pro tip! Don't share your email with recruiters, and you won't get AI-generated recruiter emails. I get about 1 spam message every 2 months or so.

ainiriand 4mo ago

When I started working in software I took a job in a city different than mine, so I had to go there to live alone, and the job was by myself in a room with no windows. Most lonely 2 years of my life.

embedding-shape 4mo ago
On the other hand, I wasn't working in software but after I moved country, I managed to get my foot into the industry, and it opened up my social life like nothing else, as finally I had people around me who also like software development, something I never experienced for ~18 years or so until I did a drastic move.
sshine 4mo ago
I rejected a job like that early in my career.
OnionBlender 4mo ago
This is my life. I drive to the office 5 days per week to sit in a tiny windowless room. I have meetings with Europe in the morning and meetings with India in the evening. The rare time I need to talk to someone in the US, they are in a different building so we talk through Teams.

chrishill89 4mo ago

I wrote an essay and sent it to Chomsky once. He wrote back that he probably won't have time to read it. Some years ago I realized that I can just start sending emails to an OSS mailing list. Without introduction just starting to post as if I belonged there. I had already made some grammar fixes more than five years before that but I started to comment and critique submissions. And submitting my own patches. Now checking the mailing list is daily habit. Unfortunately I didn't have time to post the second version of a submission on the bus today (another documentation fix). People, and especially in my culture, are very good at staying out of places where they do not belong through self-policing alone. Unfortunately to the point where at least I do get stuck in narrow patterns and never even consider certain opportunities.

senda 4mo ago
Chomsky was always amazing for this.
- justgoodfriends 4mo ago
  Yet he always found the time to read and respond to his bestie Jeff Epstein.
  - chrishill89 4mo ago
    Absolutely. You didn't have to make an account to remind me, at least. His relationship with Epstein was shameful and there is no excuse for it.

Dotcomico 4mo ago

[flagged]

jlundberg 4mo ago
Indeed! Got any advice for people who want to go for it and write their first tweet or email?

jdw64 4mo ago

I also want to communicate with someone and have programming conversations. There's no one around me to talk about programming with. I'm the only programmer around. Aside from AI and books, I sometimes want to talk with a real person.

8-prime 4mo ago
I found great enjoyment from https://late.sh/ https://late.sh/. I'm not as active as I would like to be but the small community is still active enought that there is basically always someone around to chat with.
- jdw64 4mo ago
  thanks!
  - 8-prime 4mo ago
    If you do end up joining feel free to dm me. same user as here.
    - jdw64 4mo ago
      I'm not sure about the DM feature, but I like this more than I thought. I don't have any memories of the TUI environment (most of my memories are from IRC), but it has an IRC feel to it, so I like it
- 0fflineuser 4mo ago
  I am actually blown away by how good it is. Both the features, the UI, everything. wow.
- Ocha 4mo ago
  Can’t connect unfortunately. debug1: Sending environment. debug1: channel 2: setting env LANG = "en_US.UTF-8" debug2: channel 2: request env confirm 0 debug1: channel 2: setting env LC_TERMINAL = "iTerm2" debug2: channel 2: request env confirm 0 debug1: channel 2: setting env LC_TERMINAL_VERSION = "3.6.10" debug2: channel 2: request env confirm 0 debug1: channel 2: setting env LC_ALL = "en_US.UTF-8" debug2: channel 2: request env confirm 0 debug2: channel 2: request shell confirm 1 debug2: channel_input_open_confirmation: channel 2: callback done debug2: channel 2: open confirm rwindow 8388608 rmax 32768 debug1: mux_client_request_session: master session id: 2 debug2: channel_input_status_confirm: type 99 id 2 debug2: PTY allocation request accepted on channel 2 Connection to late.sh closed by remote host.

nkjoep 4mo ago

Amazing how these people are even reachable via phone, their numbers are pretty easy to find.

jlundberg 4mo ago
Yep, the biggest blocker for a good conversation is people simply not writing an email or trying to make that call. Which is why I wrote this. Is the same at conferences: one of the best things you can do is to fo and talk to the person holding the lecture. They usually appreciate it very much. You don’t need to be famous to do that.
- CuriouslyC 4mo ago
  Most famous people are really busy though. Even people who have given me engaged replies often took a month or more to write back.

rTX5CMRXIfFG 4mo ago

I constantly wonder what life was like, then, for the earliest inventors, scientists, and curious minds in our history. Surely they didn't have many people to bounce ideas or build things with. How did they find the strength to persist in their interests? These days, it's far easier to quit when you cannot find community since you can distract yourself with many kinds of entertainment instead; and with bleak economic outlook everywhere, the very act of persistence itself can feel rather pointless.

johngossman 4mo ago
They wrote a lot of letters to each other. That's effectively how the Royal Society started, as the formalization of a network of letter writers
Leptonmaniac 4mo ago
I would say that a big part of research in Ye Old Days was either your local peers and colleagues but especially it was exchanging letters with the known Big Names in their respective fields. It is not without reason that nowadays that correspondence between researchers is a great source of insight.
gobdovan 4mo ago
They did have immense networks and were constantly communicating with one another. In On the Origin of Species, I was amazed how Darwin basically knew all the top breeders and naturists form South America, Arab Gulf, Oceania, which he mentions by name. He mentions his peers from the first page in the introduction and the correspondence and responses he got from them. There's not many geniuses without an ecosystem around them that produced them. And even if there are, how would we know about them if they weren't well connected enough to start mattering?
- delis-thumbs-7e 4mo ago
  Famously Leibniz was a genious comparable to Newton, but we have only recently started to learn the scope of his thinking and research, since most of it was left unpublished.

charcircuit 4mo ago

Why stop at these people. You might as well reach out to Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Jansen Huang. There's more to life than tech companies. Why not reach out to the president. It takes less effort than you might think to reach out to anyone in the world. It is truly a small place.

PaulRobinson 4mo ago
If you email a CEO or President, you're not emailing them. You're emailing a team of EAs who are filtering for them. Their fame leads to a lot of problems in the inbox: begging letters, death threats, and irrelevant noise more than you can imagine. They also don't know much that you can probably make use of. They might think they do, and you might think they do, but they got there mostly through knowing how to talk to boards and investors, not by being able to engage deeply in expertise that is applicable to most people looking to make their way in the World - and if becoming a CEO of a major tech firm or President is the thing you need the help with, you probably know them or people like them already. I've met quite a few famous people in tech over the years, particularly open source, and have had some short and some long conversations with many of them. I've found most people pretty approachable. I also know through another side of my life quite a few people in the media and am an acquaintance of someone who is a household name in the UK. Through him, I've met famous sports people, writers, actors, etc., and through that and other networks I know people who have worked behind the scenes on major TV and theatre shows who have met hundreds of famous people. The one thing that unifies all of them is obvious, but seemingly lost on a lot of people who "other" those whose names are known to them despite never meeting them: they're all just human. They're not "other", they're us. Including everyone you see on TV, everyone you have read about in magazines, everyone you see on a stage. They have to put up with being recognised and people dealing with them in strange ways (how would you really deal with a stranger asking for a selfie while you were eating dinner with your family in a restaurant?), but they still do all the things you and I do. As the old saying goes, they all have to put their trousers on one leg at a time in the morning. I'd definitely encourage people to seek out experts (not just "famous people" unless those people are famous for expertise), and engage them as you'd want to be engaged about your expertise. You'll find most people will be approachable. But emailing that specific list of people is unlikely going to get you much beyond a template reply from one of their army of assistants.

psychoslave 4mo ago

One should go for it if they enjoy it, yes. On the other hand, life and work is not meant to be spent in full time worldwide interaction either. If someone want to interact with people like Linus Torvalds, they should be aware that in his case he publicly admitted the way he interacted with other was toxic[1]. To be clear, it’s no personal attack against him, it’s about the kind of interaction that can and does occur with largely celebrated figures in general. If anything at least in that case there is some recognition of the issue, though fair credit should probably given also to all people beyond the scene who certainly made tremendous effort for this to happen. And things like popular micro-blogging platforms are notoriously known to cause interaction going toxic[2]. Just because something is possible doesn’t mean its a nice path to thrive for everybody. To each their own judgment, but at least consider the tradeoffs. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/after-years-of-abusive-e-mails-the-creator-of-linux-steps-aside https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/after-years-of-ab... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07229-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07229-y

jlundberg 4mo ago
Yeah, it’s not about spamming people but overcoming the imposter syndrome. Learning to find this balance of not being annoying is probably easiest by trying to make relevant comments on someones tweet. And the response back will give you an energy boost! :) These people are much more approachable than people generally believe.
rramadass 4mo ago
I am not sure why people keep picking on Linus Torvalds. If anything Linus has been extremely patient and accommodating of the thousands of people who do no homework w.r.t. technical subjects before contacting him, or if experienced, make inexcusable (at their level) blunders. If you approach an expert, you need to be clear in your communication, know the subject you are talking about and in general be aware that experts find trivialities aggravating and are not obliged to suffer your ignorance.

gbkgbk 4mo ago

[flagged]

mnmnmn 4mo ago

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deadbabe 4mo ago

Will there ever be any more “legendary” programmers ever again now with the rise of AI basically making any coding accomplishments unimpressive?

krapp 4mo ago
Show me the AI generated code that puts the work of these people to shame. There probably won't be any more "legendary" programmers in the future. Not because AI is qualitatively superior but because the incentives of capitalism will force us all to accept the mediocrity of AI generated software and because the lack of opportunities and loss of knowledge created by mass deskilling will make education and community impossible.
- deadbabe 4mo ago
  I guess the only “legendary” programmers would be independently wealthy millionaires and billionaires who code for fun. But no one will truly know they are even legendary because no one will care about code the same way.

cpfohl 4mo ago

Along similar lines: many of your favorite authors, musicians, and creators have public email addresses and seem to love getting emails. I’ve started writing notes with my kids to their favorite authors with ideas and always a thank you note. I’ve gotten replies from authors on NYT best sellers lists, musicians, and more. People like to be appreciated.

CuriouslyC 4mo ago
Ironically, I've found the best way to engage with creators is their YouTube channels. They're incentivized to engage by the algorithm, so if you can land a thoughtful comment early so they don't have to wade through 500 comments to see it the odds you'll get a short reply or a heart are pretty good.
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anotherevan 4mo ago
I know some authors in particular never, ever want to be sent story ideas. The potential of being accused of or sued for plagiarism down the track for something even vaguely similar is non-zero.
- cpfohl 4mo ago
  Most of our ideas are silly puns about the character names ;).

shevy-java 4mo ago

> Take the opportunity to send one of them an email or tweet. But ... why? I don't understand why I should write an email to Linus. Or Phil. Or Pete. Or Joe. I can barely keep up with the influx of existing emails as-is. Do I really want to extend to this and have to read through even MORE emails now?!

jlundberg 4mo ago
Relevant critique of this article. I should probably have elaborated more on WHY one should dare to do that and HOW you can that in a respectful and mutual way. How to increase the signal and not the noise. Sending an email without any clear purpose is not something I would encourge. But a highly thoughtful email about some of their works or question you have about a recent piece of code is probably appreciated. Genuine conversation. The easiest way to start your journey towards overcoming the imposter syndrome while not burdening someone is to reply to a recent tweet. If you have something relevant to say that is. But you probably do: more often than not.

krapp 4mo ago

This seems to be a submarine advertisement for a telephony API startup. It seems like it's been around for a few years so it probably isn't vibe-coded, but I do wonder if even small services like this will inevitably be gobbled up by AI. Like I know it probably isn't the case but I've become so jaded now that I'm looking at their teams page and wonder if these are even real people. Yes it's an amazing time for programmers but only in a "twilight of the gods" sense. The time for community passed about a decade ago, before Twitter turned into a Nazi bar and everything went entirely to shit. There's a little bit left but it's dying fast. Why would any of these people want to waste their time talking to the community that wants to assimilate their work and replace it with the mediocre shit dribbled from a Claude prompt? These people don't need your emails, they're probably already deluged with bots as it is.

jlundberg 4mo ago
Author here. Actually wrote the draft on this in January but last week finally got enough time to complete this with proper project links etc. We are certainly real people, except for one of the faces on our /support page who’s signature we use when replying to particularly aggressive fraudsters (to avoid feeling personally offended). The service might look easy on the surface, but getting all required infrastructure in place here in Europe is hard and the telecom world is surprisingly complex. ”I am jealous at you guys: backend services still has a future” a coder friend told me today at lunch. On topic, I obviously don’t think the community train has passed. Especially on meetups I see a lot of genuine connections between programmers being made. Threads, the app, has recently been the most relevant place for me to casually chat with other programmers. I don’t vouch for people to spam: but to overcome their imposter syndrome and dare to talk about coding with fellow programmers. Even the legends. And they often invite for conversations: wether it’s a comment field, pull request or tweet.

austin-cheney 4mo ago

Quite the gap. The legends the article talks about are legends because they either started a project that blew up in popularity and/or solved a demanded problem with original code. For most people writing software for a living that is gone. Its been gone since I started writing software 20 years ago. The goal post has moved. Its no longer about solving any problem. Its about hiring. The distinction is massive. Most of the people doing this work will never encounter an important problem to solve or write original code. Instead they will use tools and modify templates. There is still some troubleshooting there, but no originality. Its like being a plumber. Plumbers still make good money, but they aren't engineers. Now, with AI being pushed on everybody even becoming something like a plumber is becoming a distant gap for the next generation. The most clear exception are hobbyists, which has always been there as an exception through my years writing software. The only real distinction between most of these hobbyists and the legends is obscurity. The very real distinction between the hobbyists and less original professional is time spent practicing.

laughing_man 4mo ago
As my brother said once with exasperation: "I got into this business to write code, and now I'm just an integrator."
- amelius 4mo ago
  integrator -> plumber
  - brookst 4mo ago
    If you choose that direction, yes. But you can also choose integrator -> CPO.
  - raffael_de 4mo ago
    personally I don't find this particularly unappealing and have often referred to myself as some sort of plumber. plumbing is all about connecting standardized interfaces (threads) and then some improvisation. in IT the amount of improvisation is higher due to less standardized interfaces and interfaces are more complex. but the analogy works and I enjoy thinking about how to make interfaces exchange information efficiently.

foobarbecue 4mo ago

Wow, I was always amazed by Andrew Tridgill's prolific contributions to ardupilot / mavlink when I did some minor work on those. Had no idea he was behind rsync and samba.

Rekindle8090 4mo ago

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whack 4mo ago

Imagine being Andrew Tridgell and watching your inbox blow up today with thousands of emails from complete strangers, all just saying hi and wanting to casually chat with you. He's probably scratching his head right now and wondering what is going on

jlundberg 4mo ago
Would probably sth memoreable and positive for him :) I doubt he’ll get more than a handful.

CuriouslyC 4mo ago

It's not a great time to be a programmer, it's a great time to be a marketer that can program passably. While 10x programmers are getting ignored on social media, you can use your marketing skills to hype your half baked project into a few thousand GitHub stars, then into investment from a VC. The exception is game programmers. With AI/engines, making games has never been easier, Steam takes a lot of the guesswork out of packaging/release, and the moat in games is taste/refinement which is very AI resistant.

FrayedKnot 4mo ago
Damn, sounds like you can make some easy money if you teamed up with a guy who is really good at marketing then, or taught yourself after market.
- simbosambo 4mo ago
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rramadass 4mo ago

I want only one thing from the above list; Somebody sit with Fabrice Bellard and pick his brain on how he thinks, how he organizes projects, how he studies so many different domains, how he implements them, views on work-life balance etc. etc. Basically i want a brain dump of Fabrice Bellard.

jlundberg 4mo ago
I would certainly read that reply or even better the book! That’s actually what I asked Mike Pall to do regarding JIT. He was reluctany and probably thinks too little of his teaching ability.. but that book would be awesome for future generations of compiler folks to read! Back to Bellard, maybe a good first approach is to ping one of his co-authors like the person he made QuickJS with.

alf42red 4mo ago

I think it's great that you can still follow people like Lawrence Paulson and Moshe Vardi. It's not only a great time for programmers but also for computer scientists. Platforms like LinkedIn make it easy to share a quick observation or question, and occasionally getting a reaction from leading researchers is one of the things that keeps me interested in the field.

jlundberg 4mo ago
Very much this. Especially Daniel Stenberg or for Sweden more locally famous coders like Christian Landgren are very approachable on LinkedIn. Makes for an intresting conversation and you can learn a lot by posting a well thought comment :)

leetgent 4mo ago

Not intending to nitpick, but it's interesting that Chris Lattner is listed simply as the creator of Swift. I would have thought his work on LLVM and Mojo would have been at least as well known.

Floppyrom 4mo ago

Look mom, no hands!