It is an amazing time for programmers!

Published: 29 May, 2026

This is something I have been thinking a lot about but not yet written down in an article or blog post. It truly is a unique time to be alive as a person writing software. Many of the legends in the computer science space are still alive. Actively programming. And you can interact with them!

Programmers such as:

Andrew Tridgell link link

Creator of Samba and rsync.

Linus Torvalds link link

Creator of Linux and git.

John Carmack tweets link link

Game developer behind Doom, Quake and CTO of Oculus Rift (now Meta Quest)

Chris Lattner tweets link link

Creator of the Swift programming language.

Miguel de Icaza tweets link link

Creator of Midnight Commander and Mono C# runtime.

Fabrice Bellard link link

Mastermind behind qemu, FFmpeg, QuickJS and so much more.

Mike Pall link

Maker of LuaJIT.

Take the opportunity to send one of them an email or tweet. It might change your life.

And if you don't dare (yet) to write in English to any of the above, try in Swedish to any of the following less known but experienced and friendly programmers:

Peter Schüller link link

Co-creator of Twitter/X's database Manhattan, long time Java/C++-programmer.

Emil Tullstedt link

Friendly Python & Go programmer

Carl Öst Wilkens link link

Rusty game & imaging programmer

Per Lundberg link link

Versatile programmer and my brother, the reason I got into coding.

Lova Widmark link link

C++ programmer into assembler, anti-cheat & game development

If you want to lower the barrier even more, you could even start by sending me an email to johannesl at 46elks dot com. Let me know who of the above programmers or other thing that inspire you. I'll try to give you a helpful pointer.

Life and work is not meant to be spent in isolation.

// Johannes "jojo" Ridderstedt