Inspiration

Seymour Papert

He wrote Logo (note that this in-browser simulation of Logo doesn't quite capture the feel of programming it on an Apple IIe), a fact I learned much later reading hsi book "Mind Storms". All of his ideas in Mind Storms came true for at least one little kid through Logo - me!

Bret Victor

A font of great ideas and memorable talks. Bret has to be credited with sounding the alarm that there is any problem with programming at all.

Roy Fielding

Roy Fielding defined "REST" and also defined much of HTTP 1.1 which defines the modern internet today. See his original REST dissertation. Fun fact: He worked at UC Irvine's Office of Academic computing (now renamed Office of Information Technology), and so did I! As an undergrad. Helping CS students get their code to compile.

Tim Berners-Lee

He famously invented the browser at CERN. He (not as famously) lamented that the web has not turned out as he hoped. See this slightly dated overview of TBL's career and current doings from the w3c.

Julia Evans

So full of joy and generous wisdom about down-to-earth topics like DNS or reminding us that computers are fast. See her recent talk "Hard things made Easy" at Strange Loop. She's right up there with 3blue1brown, Adam Neely, Steve Mould, and Vi Hart as some of my favorite online communicators and teachers.

Justine Tunney

Brilliant and generous. redbean is a tiny, performant miracle program that runs without modification on 7 OSes. It is a static webserver, but can also do dynamic webserving with Lua. If it had websockets I might have used it for simpatico. However, it is written in C so making modifications requires an understanding of C and a working set of C tools.

Rich Hickey

Inventor of Clojure, and has given many excellent talks about the philosophy behind programming, like Simple made easy!

combine, it turns out, is a type of transducer, which I discovered after writing combine about after Hickey gave a transducer talk.

Grug brained developer

The Grug brained developer is great, and wrote an essay about SPA Alternatives. The act of programming should not push the human mind to the limit! And to allow this is not humane (and incidentally full of misplaced ego).

Movements

There are "movements" like the "indie web" and "local first" which resonate, although they don't always hit the mark.

Local first (and HN discussion with great links) is the idea that you should be able to do stuff without being connected to a remote host. This is a radical idea now, but it's how it's been for most of computing history.
Indie-web is a kind of alternative to big walled-garden content hosts. it's for geeks, and I don't agree with a lot of its stated goals (microformats are silly; the many "levels" of indieweb are actively harmful). But I can't argue with the basic notions of decentralized ownership and control.
IPFS and distributed web tech seems neat but its association with crypto scams have tarnished it's originally beautiful idea.
CRDTs are an important class of data-structure, which both combine and stree are related. (See this excellent Interactive Intro to CRDTs)

Note

This page is mostly limited to modern, computer-science inspiration. Truth is, I am equally inspired by the great math and science thinkers of the past. The book God Created the Integers is a wonderful collection of English translations of important math and physics works since Euclid. We take some ideas as so fundamental, like Descartes idea to abstract algebra from geometry, that it's hard to grasp what the world was like before those ideas arose, or how controversial they were at the time.

Along those lines I am a big fan of William Clifford and Clifford Algebra, sometimes called "Algebraic Geometry" and often in a particular flavor called "Projective Geometric Algebra". I love the unification of so many math ideas into a simple framework; physical law can be expressed much more cleanly. Computer graphics, too, can benefit from a cleaner representation. It's good to see a resurgance of interest in this.