“I don’t deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don’t deserve that either.” — Jack Benny
Trying something a little different with this post, I present to you my picks for the most influential developers of the August 2008-2009 season. I’d appreciate any feedback or suggestions on developers which I may have missed that deserve a mention.
Hacker of the Year Award
Doug Cutting (Hadoop)
Before Hadoop, Doug was known for his contributions with Lucene (a search indexing engine) and Nutch (a spider). Lucene had a tremendous impact on the way developers approach the search problem for their web applications and services. Hadoop raises the bar even further, it being an open-source implementation of Google’s MapReduce technology. I believe 2009 is a breakaway year for Hadoop and its creator, most notably because of the implications of running a compute cluster on the cloud (like Amazon EC2 or Rackspace Mosso). That’s why this year the Software Bloat Hacker of the Year Award goes to Doug Cutting for Hadoop. Doug recently announced his departure from Yahoo! while joining Cloudera, to continue his work on shaping the future of MapReduce on the cloud.
Runners Up
Yehuda Katz (Merb)
This guy is basically a ninja. Yehuda serves on the Ruby on Rails core team, and was lead developer on the Merb project (which is being rolled into rails 3.0 and stands to influence the rails philosophy in a big way). He is also a significant contributor to the jQuery (javascript framework) and DataMapper (ruby ORM) projects. When Fred Brooks wrote about great programmers out-coding lesser programmers by a factor of 10, Yehuda Katz is precisely the kind of code-slinger he was talking about.
Damien Katz (CouchDB)
Personally I think Damien Katz is a little crazy, but you know what they say about the line between brilliance and insanity. Damien claims to have sold his house, moved his family and lived off of his life savings while he began working on CouchDB. Somehow before he went busto and had to take the fam to the soup kitchen, IBM picked up the project. CouchDB’s tagline is simply “Relax”, that’s a good expression for the feeling of shedding the stress and anguish of trying to shard, scale, and design a schema in a traditional RDBMS. CouchDB is a distributed document database which is gaining huge momentum from the nosql crowd. As the project started to show its maturity and pick up momentum with production deployments, 2009 is turning out to be a great year for CouchDB. It’s probably only fair to also give a tip of the hat to Jan Lenhardt for his contributions both to shaping the codebase and being an ambassador to the development community at large with his presentations and documentation.
Blaine Cook and Chris Messina (OAuth)
There’s been an underlying problem with the web service model for some time now, and that is — how do you authorize external applications to access the api? Blaine Cook and Chris Messina set out to solve this problem in 2006. After wide-scale deployment on Twitter, and a small hiccup in the form of a security vulnerability with the initial spec, OAuth seems to have finally come into its own. It’s been a good year for OAuth, and several applications across the web now use OAuth to open their applications to external developers For that I think we owe Blaine and Chris a debt of gratitude.
Hongli Lai (Passenger)
Ruby on Rails deployment used to be kind of a pain. Even the creator of the framework, David Heinemeier Hansson has talked about having to regularly restart the application servers for the 37signals basecamp project. Passenger came along and changed all of that, making rails deployment a breeze and so its creator Hongli Lai deserves a very honorable mention.
Tags: award, couchdb, hacker, hackers, hadoop, merb, mod_rails, oauth, opensource, passenger, programming