Exemplary Pilots

By Max Darling. Published: . Updated: .

So far in my journey as an aspiring hacker, I've been disappointed by how little inspiration is out there on the web, particularly live coding. Every time I come across a screencast of a blindingly fast Vim user I get PUMPED and hurriedly try to copy their secret sauce. It's endless fun. But the web and YouTube are overflowing with SEO clickbait crap which makes it nye impossible to find the good stuff.

So, I've decided to take the problem into my own hands and compile a shortlist of the most impressive live programmers and their fine displays of hackery.

Jon Gjengset

Jon is probably the best programmer to learn from on this list. While he's an impressively speedy coder in his own right, Jon is a uniquely brilliant systems hacker and pedagogue. He has major credentials like a PHD from MIT and formerly running the AWS Rust build system, which I would guess puts him as one of the very best Rust programmers in the world. But's also an incredible teacher of difficult systems concepts, which is especially impressive to witness live on his programming streams - he'll hit a snag, think for a few moments, and then articulate the problem and solution perfectly.

Links:

Tags: Vim, Rust, Systems, Teaching

Andrew Kelley

The creator of the Zig language occasionally does some live coding, and it's gold. It's not every day you get to see a major programming language author at work! (In fact, this is the only example I know of...).

Links:

Tags: Vim, Zig, Systems, Compilers

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