In any profession there is a thin stratum of people who are really high quality specialists. And the area of front-end development is not an exception – it also has its personalities. People listen to their opinion, follow them in blogs and social networks and read their books. In the work process they generate different original decisions or techniques that instantly spread in the world of web development and remain actual for a long time. They create comfortable online services for a markup, write useful js-libraries, improve browsers, propagandize web-standards and render direct influence on their development. They can name themselves front-end engineer, front-end developer, web developer, web designer, UI Designer, browser compatibility expert or simply css lover, but for majority of us they are stars of front-end that make the internet look in a way we see it today. A lot of interesting reviews with decisions, techniques and news from the world of web-development often appear on the internet, signed by different authors, however far not all of us know anything about them except their names. I wanted to share with our readers some information about them.
Eric A. Meyer
(Image credits: Joshua Kulpa)
Personal website: meyerweb.com
American web designer who dedicates himself to the web for many years already. In due time he worked in Netscape. He is known for the propaganda of web-standards, had influence on Microsoft, when they implemented the modes of reverse compatibility in IE8. He wrote a number of popular in the world of web-development books, such as “Cascading Style Sheets : The Definitive Guide”, “Eric Meyer on CSS”. He is a co-founder of An Event Apart and Global Multimedia Protocols Group, and also an active participant of microformats.org and css-discuss.org. Likes to travel around the world. Eric not only speaks on different conferences but also arranges them. He is an author of famous reset.css from Eric Meyer.
Paul Irish
(Image credits: Andreas Øverland)
Personal website: paulirish.com
A young front-end developer from sunny San Francisco. His motto is “I make the www fun“. One of most productive web-developers at this moment, which was confirmed by reward “Developer of the Year 2011” on a version of .net awards. See for yourself: presently Paul occupies the post of developer in Google Chrome, he is also a participant of jQuery, Modernizr, CSS3 Please and HTML5 Boilerplate teams. He is a curator of HTML5 Rocks and creator of mothereffingtextshadow, mothereffinghsl, HTML5 Please, Move the Web Forward, Mothereffing Animated GIF and W3Fools. In addition, he likes to do useful video presentations and reports, and also he is a co-presenter of yayQuery Podcast.
Chris Coyier
(Image credits: chriscoyier)
Personal website: chriscoyier.net
Californian web-developer, owner and author of popular website http://css-tricks.com, each year he speaks with a good number of reports on different conferences, and gives not less interviews. Chris is a participant and developer in Digging into WordPress, wufoo.com, creator of such useful services as html-ipsum.com, HSLaExplorer, CSS3 ButtonMaker and ThePrintliminator, popular js-plugins – Anythingslider jQuery plugin and Perfect Fullpage Background Image.
Lea Verou
(Image credits: Krzychu Danek)
Personal website: lea.verou.me
The first woman is in this list. Greek woman Michaelia Komvouti – Verou known under more short name Lea Verou, she is new, however already sensational person in the world of front-end. In 2011 she became a finalist in the category of “Brilliant newcomer” on a version .net Awards 2011, and in the same year her report CSS3 Secrets was marked, as .net magazine’s 15 best talks of 2011. Lea comes with her reports on different conferences, writes popular articles on A List Apart, Smashing Magazine, 24 Ways and .net magazine. Her love to the web-standards, open source and CSS3 generated several cool online instruments among which you can find such as CSS3 test, -prefix-free and cubic-bezier.com
Jeffrey Zeldman
(Image credits: Jeffrey)
Personal website: zeldman.com
Jeffrey is one of the well-known web-designers in the world. It is difficult to name areas in web he did not attach his hand to. In 1998 he founded A List Apart, internet-magazine “for people that create web-sites”, which is enormously popular in the world of web-design and front-end development. The same year he, together with his friends, created “The Web Standards Project” a union of web-developers who fought for the acceptance of web-standards. They were able to influence on Microsoft and Netscape to support technologies and standards of W3C, finishing “War of Browsers”. His book Designing with Web Standards became the best seller and was translated into 13 languages. In 2001 from his website A List Apart he called the front-end developers from all around the world to give up the old techniques of markup and switch to creation of semantic code and active use of CSS. Now Jeffrey is often invited as a judge, to the conferences and institutes for giving lectures to the students.
Dan Cederholm
(Image credits: carsonworkshops)
Personal website: simplebits.com
The personality of Dan influenced me greatly – his book “Bulletproof Web Design” was the first book on a web-design I’ve read, and due to it I became interested in front-end and everything related it. But for Cederholm, maybe, now I would be a mediocre php-coder. Besides writing books, he is a founder of web-studio Simplebits and author of the same name blog. As the acknowledged expert on the fields of web-design, he worked with YouTube, Microsoft, Google, MTV, ESPN, Electronic Arts, Blogger, Fast Company, Inc. Magazine and many other companies. In a 2012 he already had time to get the TechFellow award in the nomination of Product Design & Marketing.
Peter-Paul Koch aka PPK
(Image credits: patrick h. lauke)
Personal website: quirksmode.org
When Peter (also known as ppk) was a student, there were no pre-conditions that he will become an important personality in the world of front-end – he studied Ancient History in University of Amsterdam and understood history of Roman Empire more, than HTML. Nevertheless, he started his professional activity in web in 1998. Having worked for a few months, he came to the conclusion that on a moment there was no website, which would give the exact and correct information about browsers compatibility. Therefore, the same year he decided to create it independently and begin testing the browsers. This project outgrew in QuirksMode.org, which was started in 2003. After that he began to work actively in the field of client development, and in 2007 he created an organization called “Fronteers” (frontend engineers), where initially the Dutch web-developers entered and which now numbers more than four hundred participants. The members of this organization conduct different meeting, including of the same name conference that is conducted annually from 2009. For those, who want to look through the themes of reports and level of participants, it is always possible to find videos on the internet, for example on Vimeo. In 2009 PPK stopped working on development under the standard desktop browsers and switched to the world of mobile web. As for his public activity, it is not limited with his website and Fronteers. In his LinkedIn profile it is indicated that he is a freelance front-end consultant. Probably, he is really good at it, because such companies as Vodafone, Microsoft, Opera, Google and Yahoo! used his consultations. He also writes articles for popular resources, for example, A List Apart and Digital Web Magazine, rides with reports all over the world and all in such spirit. And how not to mention his book? Peter has a writing experience it is his book ppk on JavaScript.
Afterword
It is far not all people who deserve to be named stars. In this article I tried to tell you about those, who influenced me greatly. For someone yet it can be quite another people, and you are welcome to share your ideas in the comments.