I Owe you a Beer!

As I spin around with this pale, blue dot, my time in the sun is sometimes punctuated with people that make me smile or make my life just a little easier. This often happens without that person knowing it, so I’ve decided to make a list and buy those people a beer at the first chance I get.¹

Celebrities don’t count. Oh, and friends don’t count either, as they can always count on me for the first round. Also, the beer idea also gives me a chance to get to known some of my heroes.

• David Nolen. When I first saw David speak, and reviving logic programming, I was so inspired and relieved that the “new guard” for software engineering wasn’t going to emphasize enterprise software. Also, everyone appreciates when you bend your brain to optimizing ClojureScript, and every other hard problem.
• Sacha Chua for also giving me hope that the future of software engineering is creative and innovative. Also, for putting together a global, virtual conference on Emacs.
• Bodil Stokke for kindly giving a stranger multiple pictures of hugging ponies for my talk encouraging Lisp usage (after all, parenthesis are just hugs for your function calls). Not to mention her Twitter feed often makes me laugh.
• Cameron Desautels for the nice compliment.
• Johnny Estilles for stepping forward and enthusiastically running the show for an open source project that I can’t maintain well.
• Katherine Fellows and Bridget Hillyer for creating Clojure Bridge, and to Max Martin and Justin Holguin for doing my work of bringing it to Portland.
• Matthew Baldwin for making me snicker every week for years.
• Daniel Higginbotham for writing a book that included a chapter on Emacs and smashing Hobbits. Consequently, I have no problem pushing Clojure for the Brave and True on others.
• Magnar Sveen for creating expand-region which I use a million times a day.
• Bozhidar Batsov for the many projects I use, especially Cider and Rubocop. Being a Bulgarian, might be hard to get that drink to you. Hrm.
• Benjamin Vulpes and Julio Barros for keeping my local Clojerks hangout alive in Portland.
• Carsten Dominik for creating org-mode, however, he is in the realm of celebrity, so…
• Ryan Neufeld Clojure Cookbook. Trying out Emacs for ClojureWest.

This list will grow.