These are some of my favorite blogs and websites:
Andrew Sullivan is a conservative/libertarian journalist and commentator. His opinions are incredibly thoughtful and unlike anything you’ll see from the mainstream left-wing or right-wing media. For this he’s become one of the best-known online commentators.
I Will Teach You To Be Rich is a personal finance blog written by Ramit Sethi, a recent Stanford graduate. “IWTYTBR” is designed to help young people with basic personal finance skills, and Ramit does a great job of educating his audience.
Joel Spolsky is very well-known for his writing on managing software development.
Paul Graham writes about hacking and starting companies. He’s one of the founders of Y Combinator, a “non-traditional” incubator for technology companies.
Signal vs. Noise is the blog published by 37signals, a Chicago-based web application firm. 37signals has very strong opinions on how to build useful software, and it seems to be working.
My friends
Andrew Hedges was a coworker of mine at Prometheus. Andrew is an exceptional web designer and developer, and he has an impressive mastery of user-centered design techniques. He’s the best front-end designer and developers I’ve worked with. He and his family recently moved to New Zealand.
Jeffrey Boulier was another colleague at Prometheus and Blackboard and is still a good friend of mine. He has an unusual interest in chickens. Fortunately, I don’t think his interest is prurient.
Dan Schwartz was one of the earliest hires at Prometheus. I think he started about a year before I did. Dan’s a great artist and a very talented web designer.
Gordon Freedman was an executive at Prometheus and is now the Vice-President of K-12 Education Strategy at Blackboard. I’ve gotten to know Gordon well recently, as he was an advisor for an entrepreneurship project I was involved in at Stanford. (Thanks, Gordon!)
One of my teammates on the entrepreneurship project was Debbie Heimowitz. In her “spare time,” she filmed an amazing TV program called Adina’s Deck, a kids’ show about cyber-bullying. She created this for her master’s project in Learning, Design & Technology, but she went way beyond the call of duty with it!
Leslie Wu is a Ph.D. student at Stanford, studying Human-Computer Interaction. We seem to hang out in many of the same circles, so we run into each other quite often.
Sam Odio is a grad student at the University of Virginia who I know through some online communities. Sam is an incredibly savvy technologist and businessman and I have no doubt that he’ll be accomplishing Big Things soon. He interned for a robot company here in Mountain View this past summer!
Drew Yates is a hacker who’s working on a bunch of different projects at the moment. I met him at Startup School in 2005 when we both lived out east, but he moved to Mountain View just a couple of months after I did. He’s one of two “Andrew Yates” that I know here in California — I go to grad school with the other.
Adam Smith and Matt Brezina, two friends of mine in San Francisco, founded Xobni in 2006. Xobni wants to help you “take back your inbox,” but they’ve been coding very quietly for months, so even I don’t know how they plan to do this. I’m sure when they do release their product, it’ll make a big impact.
David Schapira was a member of my fraternity, and must win the award for the most accomplished graduate of our fraternity chapter. He’s well under 30, yet he’s already a state legislator in Arizona!
Finally, Paul K. Graham was another fraternity brother of mine, who’s now a professional historian and genealogist in Atlanta. Paul has published two historical reference books — also impressive for someone at age 30!
