Developers We Admire

Paul Irish and Divya Manian present a list of front-end developers they think deserve wider recognition. The selection is based on three qualities: strong skills paired with teaching, open source contribution, and opinions grounded in testing and evidence.

Reading notes

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• Ryan Seddon develops Modernizr, writes polyfills, and explores DOM APIs and source maps.
• Hans Christian Renl contributes to HTML5 Boilerplate, works on other shared projects, and writes about advanced CSS.
• Alexis Deveria maintains caniuse.com, contributes to svg-edit, and keeps a browser history timeline that other graphs use as a base.
• Jason Kiss writes accessibility notes, tests with many accessibility tools, and bases his views on research.
• Kit Cambridge builds JavaScript libraries and helps multiple open source projects on GitHub.
• Eric Dahlström edits SVG specs, answers SVG questions in mailing lists and Stack Overflow, and maintains a repository of SVG images.
• Masataka Yakura follows HTML and browser specification changes, bug trackers, and mailing lists, then reports useful findings.
• Matt Seeley works at Netflix and writes about cross-device hardware acceleration.
• Tim Branyen created Backbone Boilerplate and Backbone Layout Manager and writes about web app problems.
• Mathieu Henri explores what can be done with less than 1K of JavaScript and contributes to 140bytes.
• Roman Cortes shows innovative CSS uses, including a 1KB Christmas tree.
• Peter Beverloo documents news about WebKit and Chromium and now works on Chrome for Android.
• Erik J Moller is a major WebGL contributor, created a 10-part WebGL learning video, and helped build EmberWind.
• Irene Ros publishes info-viz tools, contributes to open source, and maintains Miso Project and underscore.nest.
• Mike Taylor helps with cross-browser compatibility and feature detection at Opera.
• Zoe Mickley Gillenwater wrote a CSS3 book and publishes CSS articles.
• Niklas von Hertzen created html2canvas and has made experiments such as a Sudoku Solver in CSS.
• Zoltan Hawryluk researches CSS3 backward compatibility with IE and writes about the process.
• The post also names other people who deserve attention, including ZachLeat, Alex Gibson, Mike Bostock, Rob Flaherty, Raynos2, and bricss.
• The authors thank people who help shape the web through frameworks, libraries, articles, and outreach.
• They invite readers to suggest other names or publish their own lists.