Developer divide: 19 generations of computer programmers
Social media strategy: Alumni Notes, Reddit
Other career choice: Professor of mathematics
Clothing: Turtleneck sweater with elbow patches
Rhetorical tic: "I like my laziness effortless and ubiquitous."
Car: Yugo
Song: Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Klavierstücke IX"
Favorite artifact: Möbius strip
Hadoop programmers
The tool for building map/reduce jobs is technically not a language, but a collection of libraries written in Java. Not that it matters -- writing the code requires a talent for spotting the best way to spread out the workload over a cluster of machines. As long as "big data" remains a buzzword that captivates the corporate leadership, we'll see more exploring the best way to write Hadoop jobs.
Other language of choice: Java
Special skill: Making sure the data is always local
Social media strategy: Yahoo coding conferences
Other career choice: Actuary
Clothing: Flannel shirt with beard, where possible
Rhetorical tic: "Big data."
Car: Retro Schwinn 10-speed bike
Song: Dan Deacon's electronica
Favorite artifact: Stuffed elephant
Node.js programmers
They learned JavaScript when they were adding an interactive Easter egg to their band's Web page. Now they're working for the enterprise shop and using that same JavaScript to handle $10 billion in foreign-exchange transactions a day.
Other language of choice: jQuery
Special skill: Trying to remember not to block the server with code that takes too long to execute
Social media strategy: Post-Facebook, post-Path, still bummed that Diaspora hasn't gone very far
Other career choice: Going to college
Clothing: Ironic T-shirt from Old Navy
Rhetorical tic: "Threads can be concurrent? Are you sure?"
Car: Skateboard
Song: "Video Games" by Lana del Rey
Favorite artifact: Rooted Android cellphone running Node
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