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Rockstar Developers

Aug 16, 2006
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(cross-posting this to http://www.blakeseely.com/blog/ just while I get a feel for Vox)

This year was my first WWDC, and with it came the excitement not only of new hardware and learning about Leopard (Yes, even employees don’t always know the details), but also getting to meet and mingle with other Mac developers - people whose work I admire, whose blogs I read, and who I was truly giddy about meeting. Gus Mueller, John Gruber, Jonathan Wight, Brent Simmons, David Watanabe, Greg Hulands,… the list goes on. So what is it about the Mac platform and its rockstar developers? I know I wasn’t the only one - even a few of the people I was excited to meet, told me how much they wanted to meet somebody else. I get the feeling this phenomenon doesn’t happen on other platforms, or in other lines of work.

Is the software just better? Do people use a Windows app and think “This is brilliant, I really want to meet the person who built this!”

Is the community just smaller? Is it not possible on other platforms to have a grasp of who some of the bigger players and also have those people be relatively accessible?

Is it just more important to Mac users and developers that their developers have blogs and ideas besides just writing software?

I think it was Brent Simmons who suggested that the phenomenon starts at the top - Steve Jobs - and from there flows an importance on personality and opinion in addition to powerful, well-designed software. Is there more of a cult of personality on the Mac?

In the end, it’s probably a combination of everything above - without a small-ish community, maybe it would be impossible to keep track of all the blogs and software that talented Mac developers are putting out there. And the Mac platform definitely cares about style and design in addition to functionality. Whatever the reason, between getting to meet so many new people, ordering a new Mac Pro, and seeing the first glimpses of Leopard, I think my first WWDC was a good one. It’s a good time to be a Mac developer.

What do you think? Which rockstar Mac developers do you look up to?