GitHub Follow Friday

As we promised on WatchWednesday, we’re bringing back FollowFriday, but for GitHub. As a regular Friday feature, we’ll offer up our list of who you should follow. Fork us and send us your list, too.

Our community has its own celebs and high-profile founders, but let us say up front that Follow Friday isn’t about popularity alone. Instead, we’ll feature GitHub users who contribute to and truly influence the open source community on GitHub.

bmizerany (Blake Mizerany)

Blake’s Sinatra and its simple DSL have inspired more tribute bands than perhaps The Chairman himself. The next time you hear “it’s like Sinatra, but for…”, think of Blake. Blake has over a hundred repos on GitHub, his most recent is Swirl, a version agnostic EC2 client.

felixge (Felix Geisendörfer)

Outside of Ryan Dahl, perhaps nobody else as avidly contributed to Node.js than Felix. Felix also has created projects like node-dirty, a tiny and fast key value store for Node that should be ideal for apps with < 1 million records.

cloudhead (Alexis Sellier)

Alexis has multi-language skills and is the mind behind LessCSS and Vows, but one of my favorite projects is Toto, a nifty Rack-based blogging tool for hackers.

jashkenas (Jeremy Ashkenas)

You probably know Jeremy’s superhero alter-ego Document Cloud under which he’s released popular projects like Underscore.js. But lately Jeremy’s own project CoffeeScript has also become quite popular. Jeremy is the first two-time guest on The Changelog, appearing on Episode 0.0.5 and Episode 0.2.9.