1990s to today
Kent Beck
Brought test-driven development and Extreme Programming into mainstream practice.
Timeless principleTight feedback loops
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Heroes of Software Development
These are the people we routinely cite when explaining disciplined delivery: pioneers whose habits shaped how teams debug, ship, and reason about value. Their portraits make those conversations tangible.
Each card links to a biography so it is easy to revisit the practices and timeless principles they made famous. Use the gallery in workshops, leadership offsites, or onboarding sessions to anchor discussions in the craft's history instead of opinion chains.
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1990s to today
Mary Poppendieck
Translated Lean manufacturing ideas into modern software delivery.
Timeless principleEliminate waste and optimize flow
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
1990s to today
Guido van Rossum
Created Python and shaped its readability-first philosophy.
Timeless principleReadability counts
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
1990s to today
Linus Torvalds
Started the Linux kernel and Git, redefining collaborative development.
Timeless principleRelease early, review often
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
1990s to today
James Gosling
Designed Java and seeded the JVM ecosystem.
Timeless principleStable platforms and contracts
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
1980s to today
Bjarne Stroustrup
Created C++ to marry performance with rich abstractions.
Timeless principleZero-overhead abstraction
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
1970s to today
Leslie Lamport
Codified how we reason about distributed systems and specifications.
Timeless principleSpecify before implementing
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
1980s to today
Ward Cunningham
Invented the wiki and helped launch Extreme Programming practices.
Timeless principleSmall steps and shared understanding
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
1980s to today
Radia Perlman
Invented the spanning tree protocol and resilient Ethernet.
Timeless principleDesign for failure
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
1960s to 1990s
Margaret Hamilton
Led Apollo flight software and made "software engineering" a discipline.
Timeless principleTreat software as engineering
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
1970s to 2000s
Barbara Liskov
Pioneered data abstraction, CLU, and the substitution principle.
Timeless principleProgram to abstractions and contracts
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
1960s to today
Donald Knuth
Documented algorithms and literate programming craft.
Timeless principleKnow your algorithms
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
1960s to 2000s
Fred Brooks
Exposed project myths through IBM System/360 and The Mythical Man-Month.
Timeless principleNo silver bullets
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
1970s to 2000s
Niklaus Wirth
Designed Pascal, Modula, and Oberon to pair data with algorithms.
Timeless principleAlgorithms plus data structures
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
1970s to 2010s
Dennis Ritchie
Co-created C and Unix with portable, clean abstractions.
Timeless principlePortability with control
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
1960s to 2000s
Ken Thompson
Co-created Unix, the B language, Plan 9, and UTF-8.
Timeless principleBuild small, composable tools
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
1950s to 2000s
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Advocated structured programming and calm reasoning about correctness.
Timeless principleSimplicity plus correctness
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
1940s to 1990s
Grace Hopper
Pioneered compilers and machine-independent programming languages.
Timeless principleRaise abstraction for humans
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
1930s to 1950s
Alan Turing
Formalized computation and helped decrypt Enigma traffic.
Timeless principleDefine problems precisely
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
1840s
Ada Lovelace
Envisioned software beyond calculation for Babbage's Analytical Engine.
Timeless principleSoftware is imagination
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Want to include someone else? Add them to the YAML list above, provide a Wikimedia-compatible portrait, and Jekyll will render the new card automatically.