I wrote fanmail to a couple of programmers.

The programmers in question were Havoc Pennington and Keith Packard.

I don’t know too much about programming per se (I am very early in the process of learning Python, my first language), but I do know what I like.

Keith Packard does lots of stuff, and one of the things he works on is X, the graphics server for unix. He works with freedesktop.org and does things like make antialiasing work well in linux. Havoc wrote metacity, was chairman of gnome, and generally seems to know how to remove features in order to streamline interfaces. He even wrote an essay about that. At any rate, I sent them both e-mail telling them I appreciated what they had done, and asked them to pass along my thanks to people involved that I wasn’t aware of. They haven’t gotten back to me, but I imagine its because they are both busy making good software (or making software good).

Feel free to share any particular programmers that you think are worth appreciating in the comments, that way we can all appreciate them.