Roy Fielding
I met a serious living legend this weekend at the Day Ignite conference in Chicago. I don’t usually get star-struck, but Fielding is one of the principal authors of HTTP, the creator of the REST architectural style, not to mention tons of other contributions to, well, the world. Browsers work the way they do, largely, because of him and his work. Just about everyone on the planet uses HTTP. And I have a career because of his work. My wife asked “so it’s his fault I always have to type HTTP?” And the answer is, well, yes, but that’s a good thing 
I’m looking forward to learning more about waka, his next contribution.
The conference was a great experience. I had the opportunity to meet David Nuescheler (for the second time) who is the spec lead for JSR-283, for Java Content Repositories. I also had the opportunity to speak with Jean-Michel Pittet, Day Software’s SVP of Engineering, Greg Klebus, a Day product manager, and Lars Trieloff again, also a product manager at Day, who I met for the first time a few months back. I had the opportunity to chat with many of Day’s great customers, including Warren Habib from MTV, who I met for the first time about a year ago at an event in New York.
Most importantly, I got to enjoy an incredible event with some developers on my team. I wish I could have brought them all, but I had a great time with Andrei, @parito, and @filku, and we were able to learn a lot about Day’s plans for CQ 5.4, which is currently in beta. Thank you to New York Media, who flipped the bill for us to attend this conference. We’re hoping to return in 2011 in San Francisco!