While we cannot highlight the thousands upon thousands of insightful and talented developers on Twitter, we have found a breadth of insightful, successful, and helpful developers and designers that encompass the many languages, companies, and people that make up the world of development. We don't claim you'll be able to build the next revolutionary social media company by following these 20 people, but they can definitely help make you a better programmer.
We don't want this list of 20 to be the end of your developer education, so if you have a favorite developer that you think others will gain by following, we encourage you to link to them and provide a bit of background.
1. Eric Meyer
Twitter: @meyerweb
Associated with: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
Byte-sized summary: Eric Meyer is one of the best-known developers and advocates for a standardized web, especially CSS, which has helped revolutionize web design.
2. John Resig
Twitter: @jeresig
Associated with: jQuery
Byte-sized summary: John is the creator of the jQuery javascript framework and the JavaScript Evangelist for Mozilla. If that doesn't impress you, he tweets an impressive amount of javascript tips and useful links.
3. Jeff Atwood
Twitter: @codinghorror
Associated with: Coding Horror, Stack Overflow
Byte-sized summary: The author of the popular Coding Horror blog, Jeff is one of the founders of Stack Overflow, the developer Q&A community.
4. Joel Spolsky
Twitter: @spolsky
Associated with: Joel on Software, Fog Creek Software, Stack Overflow
Byte-sized summary: Joel is the author of not only Joel on Software, but has been involved in major projects like Microsoft Excel, Visual Basic, Stack Overflow, and his own firm, Fog Creek Software.
5. Paul Buchheit
Twitter: @paultoo
Associated with: Gmail, FriendFeed
Byte-sized summary: Paul was the lead developer of Gmail, coined Google's "Don't be evil" motto, and is co-founder of the popular social media aggregator FriendFeed. Most of his tweets come via FriendFeed, so we suggest subscribing to his FriendFeed as well.
6. Molly Holzschlag
Twitter: @mollydotcom
Associated with: Molly.com, Web Standards Project, Opera
Byte-sized summary: Molly has written about 30 books on web design and mark-up. She's one of the most well-known faces in promoting web standards, is currently with Opera, and doesn't fail to tweet insightful information on HTML, CSS, XML, and markup.
7. Kevin Marks
Twitter: @kevinmarks
Associated with: Technorati, Epeus Epigone, Google, Microformats
Byte-sized summary: A heavily engaged tweeter, Kevin Marks is Google's OpenSocial Developer Advocate, former lead engineer of Technorati, and helped build the Microformats semantic markup approach.
8. Jesse Stay
Twitter: @Jesse
Associated with: SocialToo
Byte-sized summary: The self-described "social geek" is the founder and CEO of SocialToo, a popular tool for helping keeping friend lists organized across multiple social networks. As you can imagine, Jesse fully embraces social media and is always discussing trends and social development.
9. Rasmus Lerdorf
Twitter: @rasmus
Associated with: PHP, Yahoo
Byte-sized summary: Ramsus is the creator of the PHP programming language. Nearly everything he tweets is about code, which is exactly what we want to learn about from Ramsus.
10. Chris DiBona
Twitter: @cdibona
Associated with: Google, Slashdot, Open Source
Byte-sized summary: DiBona is a well-known open source advocate and is primarily known as the open source program manager within Google. He's very responsive on his Twitter to development questions, especially ones related to Google Code.
11. Kathy Sierra
Twitter: @KathySierra
Associated with: Head First, game development
Byte-sized summary: Kathy was the co-author of the software engineering book series Head First, and primarily works with Java. She tweets often, a fair amount of her tweets are centered around programming concepts and social media.
12. Ryan Stewart
Twitter: @ryanstewart
Associated with: Rich Internet Applications, Adobe
Byte-sized summary: If Flash, AIR, and other Adobe products fascinate you, then Ryan Stewart is the man to follow.
13. David Heinemeier Hansson
Twitter: @dhh
Associated with: Ruby on Rails, 37signals
Byte-sized summary: David was the inventor of the Ruby on Rails framework, which powers some of the world's most popular websites, including Twitter. He tweets out interesting links and info on RoR.
14. Scott Hanselman
Twitter: @shanselman
Associated with: .NET, Microsoft
Byte-sized summary: As Senior Program Manager at Microsoft's Developer Division, Scott has a great deal of knowledge of the .NET framework, C# (he taught it as a professor), and an array of Microsoft projects.
15. Jason Fried
Twitter: @jasonfried
Associated with: 37signals
Byte-sized summary: Jason Fried is the CEO and co-founder of 37signals, a well-respected web application company responsible for Basecamp, Backpack, and other business applications. Just like the 37signals blog, he likes to tweet out practical advice.
16. Thomas Fuchs
Twitter: @thomasfuchs
Associated with: Ajax, Ruby on Rails, Fluxiom
Byte-sized summary: Thomas Fuchs is the creator of the script.aculo.us AJAX library and a core developer for the Prototype Javascript library that is part of the Ruby on Rails framework. He tweets on topics ranging from Firefox variables to Spymaster.
17. Wil Shipley
Twitter: @wilshipley
Associated with: Omni Group, Macintosh software
Byte-sized summary: Wil Shipley was co-founder of The Omni Group, which builds the Omni line of Mac software. He's one of those developers that loves to @reply help for users with bugs.
18. Elijah Manor
Twitter: @elijahmanor
Associated with: .NET, Compuware
Byte-sized summary: On his blog, he lays out a schedule of a tweet per hour on a different programming topic, either web-based languages (jQuery, CSS, etc.) or .NET and Microsoft-based technologies.
19. Aza Raskin
Twitter: @azaaza
Associated with: Mozilla, Bloxes, Songza, user interface
Byte-sized summary: Aza is a master of user interface and current head of user experience at Mozilla Labs. He also founded Songza, Bloxes, and tweets a great deal about Firefox, Ubiquity, and most recently, Mozilla Jetpack.
20. Jack Dorsey
Twitter: @jack
Associated with: Twitter
Byte-sized summary: While Jack may not be tweeting many programming tips these days, it's only fitting that a list like this ends with the mind and the man behind the Twitter architecture.
Mashable’s Social Media series for developers supported by Forum Nokia
Forum Nokia’s Calling All Innovators competition challenges mobile and web application developers to submit best-in-class applications for use on Nokia devices. Winning Apps will be featured in Nokia’s Ovi Store, where consumers will find the best mobile applications and content for their Nokia devices. Total cash and prizes are worth more than $250,000. Deadline for contest submissions is 30 June 2009. Submit Your Winning App Now.
More web development resources from Mashable:
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- 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design
- 7 Useful Tools for Web Development Testing
- Web Development Toolbox: 120+ New Tools for Web Development