15 Software Development Influencers You Should Follow in 2018

From software developers to software architects, the software world is full of influential people, many of whom have active social media presence. Therefore, I decided to write an article about those top software development influencers who changed our lives. Following these guys will help you stay up to date with software best practices, innovations, tools, projects and many more! To be honest, it was hard to come up with this list as there are many other talented software experts, but I decided to include these ones because these people wrote books, introduced new concepts and tools to software development and keep being active nowadays. They absolutely deserve to be mentioned! 

Martin Fowler

Martin Fowler is one of the biggest experts in software design and has absolutely fantastic blog, where he shares with his methods, ideas and inventions. His favourite topics are microservices, continuous delivery, Agile, and refactoring. He wrote many useful books and regularly gives presentations about software design around the world. 

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Vaughn Vernon

Vaughn Vernon is an industry-leading thinker in Domain-Driven Design (DDD). Vaughn also wrote several books, including his most recent, Domain-Driven Design Distilled, and constantly gives workshops and presentations all over the world.

Twitter

Eric Evans

Eric Evans is a well-known expert in Domain Language and software design. He wrote many influential books about these topics and he is quite active in social media, sharing his experiences and thoughts.

Twitter

Kent Beck

Kent Beck is more than just a key figure in software industry; he is the father of Test-Driven Development and extreme programming. He wrote several books about refactoring, software design, and Junit. He is very active in social media and gives valuable advice every day.

Twitter

Erich Gamma

Erich Gamma is another very good author and software development enthusiast. He is a Swiss computer scientist and co-author of the influential software engineering book, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Also, he co-wrote the JUnit software testing framework with Kent Beck.

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Claus Ibsen

Claus Ibsen is a principal engineer working for Red Hat specializing in cloud and integration. He has worked on Apache Camel for the last seven years where he heads the project. He is also an author of multiple widely-read books.

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Andy Hunt

Andy Hunt is a writer of books on software development. Hunt co-authored The Pragmatic Programmer, ten other books, many articles, and was one of the 17 original authors of "The Manifesto for Agile Software Development" and founders of the Agile Alliance. He is very active on Twitter, where he shares very interesting software development information.

Twitter

Dave Thomas

Dave Thomas is a computer programmer, author, and editor. He has written The Pragmatic Programmer, and coined the phrases “Code Kata” and “DRY,” and was an original signatory and author of "The Manifesto for Agile Software Development."

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Steve McConnell

Steven C. McConnell is an author of software engineering textbooks such as Code Complete, Rapid Development, and Software Estimation. He is also an expert in software engineering and project management.

Twitter

Lisa Crispin

Lisa Crispin is an author of several interesting books about Agile and testing. She enjoys sharing her experiences and learning from others. She specializes in showing testers and Agile teams how testers can add value and how to guide development with business-facing tests. Her Twitter page is very active and you will definitely find it interesting.

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Jez Humble

Jez Humble is an award-winning author and researcher on software who has spent his career tinkering with code, infrastructure, and product development in organizations of varying sizes across three continents, most recently working for the US government.

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Mike Cohn

Mike Cohn regularly gives actionable advices, tips and guidance for creating high-performing teams. He is one of the contributors of the Scrum software development methodology.

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Alistair Cockburn

Alistair Cockburn is an American computer scientist, known as one of the initiators of the agile movement in software development. He is one of the most respected agile software development experts nowadays and his blog helped many developers to grow professionally.

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Scott W. Ambler

Scott W. Ambler is a Canadian software engineer, consultant and author. He is an author of a number of books focused on the disciplined Agile delivery process. He is a speaker at a wide variety of conferences worldwide and often asked to deliver conference keynote speeches as well as give internal presentations at organizations. He tweets his thoughts and observations about software development and write articles for several publications.

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Chiu-Ki Chan

Chiu-Ki Chan is an Android developer with a passion for speaking and teaching. She is a Google Developer Expert in Android and currently runs her own mobile development company. She regularly shares her Android knowledge on stage at different technology conferences around the world. 

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