Software Engineers

Margaret Hamilton

MIT engineer who led the software for the Apollo Moon landings and coined “software engineering”

1936 – 2026

Joel Spolsky

Software writer who co-founded Stack Overflow, Trello and Fog Creek

Zhang Yiming

Founder of ByteDance, the company behind TikTok

Born 1983

Theo de Raadt

Founder of OpenBSD and OpenSSH

Born 1968

Rob Pike

Canadian programmer who co-created the Go language and UTF-8

Steve Chen

Taiwanese-American co-founder and first CTO of YouTube

Born 1978

Kent Beck

Creator of extreme programming and pioneer of test-driven development

Born 1961

Martin Fowler

British software author known for Refactoring and agile methods

Born 1963

James Gosling

Canadian computer scientist known as the father of Java

Born 1955

Grady Booch

Software engineer who co-created the Unified Modeling Language

Born 1955

Bram Moolenaar

Dutch programmer who created the Vim text editor

Bob Frankston

Programmer who co-created VisiCalc, the first PC spreadsheet

Born 1949

Anders Hejlsberg

Danish software engineer behind Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# and TypeScript

Born 1960

Marc Andreessen

Co-creator of the Mosaic browser, co-founder of Netscape and venture capitalist

Born 1971

Linus Torvalds

Finnish-American creator of the Linux kernel and Git

Born 1969

John Resig

Creator of the jQuery JavaScript library

Born 1984

Jeff Dean

Google engineer behind MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow and Gemini

Born 1968

Steve Sinofsky

Former head of Microsoft Office and Windows

Born 1965

Pony Ma

Co-founder and CEO of Tencent, maker of WeChat

Born 1971

Phil Zimmermann

Creator of PGP, the first widely available strong email encryption

Born 1954

Nathan Blecharczyk

Engineer who co-founded Airbnb and built its first website

Mike Lynch

Founder of Autonomy, once called Britain’s Bill Gates

1965 – 2024

Max Levchin

Ukrainian-born PayPal co-founder and CEO of Affirm

Born 1975

Jawed Karim

YouTube co-founder who uploaded its first video, “Me at the zoo”

Born 1979