I can vaguely remember the 4 year old me turning the computer on while my cousin starts a dos shell to play Dangerous Dave.

5 year old me finds wolfenstien installed on my windows 95 , doom a few years later , quake after that .. one masterpiece after another.

Little did I know that software can make memories.

I grew up with software made by these legends and nothing excites me more than the dream of one day being in a team just like theirs with the goal of having fun and spreading it.

Carmack and Romero .. the people who architected fun from code.

I don’t really have just one.

Ada Lovelace, she is the reason we have everything and she is the OG

Margaret Hamilton is badass and got Apolo 11 to the moon

Steve Wozniak, the real brains behind OG Apple. And his tech revolutionized computers. Plus have you ever just watched a video of him he’s so fucking pure and innocent. Like holy fuck he’s awesome and just hella intelligent.

John Romero + John Carmack. Two of the programmers on the original DOOM dev team. The team revolutionized the gaming industry and

Katie Bouman, just got added to the list for the black hole picture

One of my first classes about networks my teacher was talking about the differences between a Hub and a Switch, he just stop the class and say a random student's name from the list.

Teacher: "Martin Romero?"
Martin: "here"
Teacher: "this is how a Hub works, everyone listen the message but only Martin answer it."

It was the best example I ever heard from a teacher, one of the best in the whole university imo.

I have quite a few but I'll try to narrow it down.

Micheal Reeves
John Carmack
John Romero
Steve Wozniak
Ken Thompson
Brian Kernighan

On my list:

* John Romero (id Software)
* Yukihiro Matsumoto (Ruby programming language)
* Donald Knuth (LaTeX)
* Gosuke Myashita (serverspec)
* Johan de Wit (puppet guru and my personal sensei that taught me a lot of things and also a good friend I cherish)

People pressure me to get a degree but I think which I’ll pass, I don’t care about getting into research or management and if Carmack and Romero did what they did with little formal education I guess which I can be a good enough programmer to distinguish myself in my area without it.

I have a list of favorites but the first person that always usually comes to mind is John Romero.

I love listening to the talks Romero gives and even though I don’t partake in the practice of developing games I still love hearing his stories about his projects development or having to work with old/retro tech and learn something from those stories.