Choose 3 Developers You’d Spend a Day With

Here’s a question. Given 3 days and allotted 1 day per developer, which 3 developers would you spend it with? Here’s the caveat, the developers MUST BE in the web development community.

Here are my choices in no specific order:

  • Nicole Sullivan – Why? Because she is a freaking CSS guru and the amount of CSS knowledge I could gain from a day of her mentoring would be so incredibly valuable. She’s also a super-cool person.
  • Nicholas Zakas – Why? Well, there are a lot of people who are really awesome JavaScript developers but few, in my opinion, who have the experience in a large-scale environment. Nicholas has that, as the principal front-end engineer for Yahoo! and that’s knowledge worth nabbing. And if you’ve watched his presentations, you know he can teach.
  • Joe Stump – Why? Because Joe is one of the coolest dudes on the planet and apart from that, he has the knowledge to build out BIG sites. Now that he’s focused on geolocation, getting into that would be so cool. Plus, I know Joe loves kids so I could talk to him about babies and stuff. ;)

Now, my list isn’t meant to leave anyone out because there are a ton of people who I’d like to learn from. This is just a group who I feel, at the moment, would offer knowledge that I want right now and they’re just great for providing that. So hopefully, I won’t hurt anyone’s feelings. :)

So who would you pick?

Rey Bango

21 Comments

  1. Anders Hejlsberg, Mark Russinovich, and Linus Torvalds

  2. Scott Hanseleman (just because he’s cool, not because he’s all that great a developer :) but also because he’s the best parts of Microsoft, part Gu, part Haack)

    Pamela Fox (she’s an amazing Google API dev and I could learn a ton plus she wouldn’t embarrass me for knowing so little)

    I would say Jeff Atwood except that he would talk to me about building social websites the whole time and I’d have to shive myself to change the subject onto the blood gushing out of my side . . but even that probably won’t distract Jeff . . . that man has focus.

    There are so many great developers I’d need to research the third one for a few hours.

  3. I really enjoyed listening to Nicholas Zakas at jQuery Conference 2010 in SF. Very insightful, he brought up some things that have permanently affected the way I write JavaScript.

  4. What a great idea. For, me I’d definitely like to spend some serious time with any or all of these:

    Scott Schiller
    John Resig
    Douglas Crockford

    All amazing minds!

  5. I would say

    1. Doug Neiner cause he has great talent in design, CSS and tools that I could pick up a ton of great tips. I’ve spent two days with him in Boston and learned a ton.

    2. Jonathan Sharp – guy just has the jack of all trades hat on. There is a ton I can learn from him in various areas.

    3. Scott Hanselman – I’ve learned so much from his blog I’d love to see how he breaks things down and debugs problems one of the best debuggers I’ve seen. I could learn some ASP.NET MVC me thinks too. Plenty of developer inspiration from Scott as well.

    Ralph

  6. 1. Mr Doob – I can haz make 3D
    2. Brian LeRoux – PhoneGap kicks, plus I wanna drink a few beers with him
    3. NCZ – So cool you know his name as an Acronym.

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