Jeremy Geelan has published his list of 100 all-time heroes of i-Techlogies. I ‘d go with a shorter list and removed the “All-Time ” from the title. The “All-Time ” is not applicable for IT personalities. A hundreds years from now people will laugh like crazy reading most of the today ‘s blogs and books on programming. But it ‘s a thought-provoking list and you are encouraged to come up with your own list.

This is the list of IT personalities I respect (in case if this blog will live forever, this is the version of February 4, 2007 9AM EST). These are people of different caliber, but I do respect them a lot.

1. Bill Gates – this guy is above and beyond. While the blogoshpere is heavily infected with Windows-bashing blogs, most of these these hypocrites are using Windows daily. Bill is a perfect combination of a technical savvy guy and a businessman.

2. Donald Knuth – the author of the multi-volume The Art of Computer Programming, one of the most highly respected references in the computer science field, which is not known to 90% of the current professional programmers.

3. Sergey Brin – Google CEO. This company makes a difference. I do not know how he did it, because I ‘m sure that there were/are other comparable search engines. It ‘s not about search engine, it ‘s about Google.

4. Joel Spolsky – a smart guy and one of the best essay writers in IT.

5. Dennis Ritchie – creator of the C language.

6. Joe Celko – an SQL guru and writer. If you do not know him (and SQL), it ‘s a shame.

7. Tim O ‘Reilly – the IT book publisher. There are many of those, but somehow O ‘Reilly ‘s books stand out.

8. James Gosling – creator of the Java language. Many people can create a programming language, but not many people can create and market (Sun Microsystems deserves lots of credits here) a programming language that is used by five million people in the world.

9. Steve Jobs – a man with a vision from Apple. There is always something cooking in Apple ‘s kitchen. I wonder what ‘s coming after iPhone?

10. Jeff Bezos – a founder of the first super-successful Internet Enterprise – Amazon.com. Do you still think that Amazon is an Internet book retailer? Big mistake. Huge. Think Web Services, storage and virtual servers solutions, mechanical turk…

11. Yakov Fain – there is no entry for my name in Wikipedia yet, but my wife firmly believes that I am a very good programmer who is underpaid and should bring more money home. Even though she ‘s a programmer herself, she does not read my blogs, otherwise she ‘d know my opinion on “underpaid programmers “. But anyway, I respect this opinion and hopefully one day some large firm will recognize it too, and will start using my potential to its fullest.