CEOs or CTOs that still write code

3 points·playing_colours··3 comments

Do you know talented engineers who became CTOs / CEOs / etc. and still very much into coding, technology? I am very interested to read about them, their blogs, Twitter, get inspiration and understanding on how they manage to lead teams, think about big picture, define technical strategy for companies, and, at the same time go deep into tech, coding? Say, people like John Carmack?

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I heard that Anthony Casalena, CEO of Squarespace, was quite involved on the technical aspects even as of some years ago.

I saw some interview somewhere and he was talking about a DB sharing operation that was ongoing and had him busy. I can't remember the year of the interview; maybe around 2013? Seems like a long time ago but Squarespace was founded in 2003.

He doesn't have much on GitHub but he did update his dotfiles as of a year ago.

https://github.com/acasalena/dotfiles

I am pretty sure the CEO of FastMail still digs in pretty deep, given the content of blog posts he pens and a response to a support request I got once. He's also active on HN, so perhaps he will confirm/deny. :P

I am trying to think of anyone else I can think of who I could comfortably say is "a CEO" and who I'm confident still "writes code".

DHH (creator of Ruby on Rails) is the CTO of Basecamp and an overall fascinating person. He writes on Medium about coding and has mentioned in interviews that he still enjoys "writing code"

https://twitter.com/dhh

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