Heroes

This is my space to give some props to some of the "heroes" who make development easier and my online life more enjoyable through their code and knowledge. Sure, there's obvious people like Bill Gates, who contributed Windows (and like it or not advanced computing faster than it would have been in my opinion) but I am going for more down-to-earth people. The ones out there still blazing the trails with code because they seem passionate about it.

Most of these people are on mailing lists I subscribe to, and reading their posts always leaves me green in envy of their technical feats and how they compose themselves.

I plan on updating this list as I think of it or discover new people I consider a hero...

John Resig One word: jQuery. John, thank you for solving all my JavaScript needs. Cross-browser support, a simple syntax, and all the plugins available have made anything that used to be nasty DHTML a thing of the past. Now I don't flinch when I need to add some sort of client-side scripting to my pages - I just write a few lines of jQuery and move on.
Jan Kneschke Jan must write C and Lua in his sleep. He's behind Lighttpd, MySQL Proxy, XCache and who knows what else. He seems to be working on multiple projects all the time and making advances in them constantly. Not only creating new features out of need, but also just to see if it would work...
Brad Fitzpatrick LiveJournal used to be the king. Nowadays with Facebook and Myspace it's moved down the totem pole. However, being king for a while did produce some cool stuff that Brad (and team) has been graceful enough to share. Probably the most popular is memcached, but MogileFS is pretty damn cool too. I also get a kick out of reading the history of their crazy LiveJournal server architecture.
Steven Grimm If someone was to visit the memcached mailing list nowadays, it would seem like memcached is Steven's baby. Steven and his team at Facebook have made great improvements to the memcached project and have also helped with various PHP related modules (APC for instance.) Of course, it is always fun to read more information about their architecture.
Jeremy Zawodny Back when I was trying to tune MySQL more, I wound up on Jeremy's site a lot. Yahoo has him on payroll, and he probably gets paid for being a general technical genius with specialties in MySQL and LAMPish development.
Rasmus Lerdorf, Derick Rethans, Wez Furlong, Ilia Alshanetsky The PHP team deserves all the kudos in the world. I love PHP, and for the most part PHP has loved me. Between the four of these guys, you've got a large portion of PHP, Xdebug, APC and countless other related projects and modules. They've made web development a joy for me, when I don't have to write for lame projects that is :)