DaveWiner

Quora Answer : Is there any individual programmer who became successful like artists do?

Nov 23, 2015

I sometimes call Dave Winer (Scripting News) "the great auteur of social software".

He's basically been developing on a series of themes : outliners, news-feeds, blogging software, communication and collaboration software, for about 40 years.

In doing so, he's guided by a fairly deep "philosophy" that's both humanist and technological :

• the humanist part : everyone's voice is valuable and everyone should have a channel through which they can be heard. That such free communication benefits us all.
• the technological part : that the best way to ensure this is through standards and platforms that remain reliably open and non-coopted by commercial interest.

Better than the cinematic auteurs who allegedly do everything themselves, Winer actually DOES do everything himself. He exemplifies and performs the role of "human with a voice" every day on his long-running blog, revealing both his wisdom and his flaws, publicly. He's a gadfly, challenging received wisdom. He's a tireless fighter and polemicist for open-standards and interop. In the past he's had companies and programmers working for him, but even without them, he continues to write and release and rewrite code, working towards his perfect platform for communication and collaboration. The latest round of software is written in javascript / node.js and released GPLed on GitHub.

I would suggest that taking Winer's body of work as a whole, you ought to consider him the equivalent to any "novelist / public intellectual" on the scene today. Yes, his "art" is code. But just as an intellectual novelist is more than a compelling story teller, but someone who aims to capture the zeitgeist and transform people's lives through his or her writing, Winer's art of blogging / blogging software is also capturing the zeitgeist and aiming to transform people's lives. It's a consistent and individual vision, which has both inspired other social software developments (from Blogger to Twitter and Facebook) and yet continually remains apart and critical of them. Still aiming to go beyond them.