Geekery

Geek God – Dries Buytaert

Posted on 02. Mar, 2010 by Jake in Geek God

NOTE: We will be changing the Geek God section to feature local geek icons. For now, unfortunately, the post I wrote with details on this has been lost in the ether during our migration of Geekery to a new server. We will be reposting that one soon, but for now, here’s one last look at an international Geek God before we shift our focus to leading local geeks.

You can keep your rock stars and your famous sportsmen and your literary icons. While normal people are busy worshiping these characters, true geeks, particularly programmers and developers, have different heroes. A developer who has written an impressive and game changing system, platform or app will be spoken about in hushed tones and hailed as a hero. And no developer is held up on a higher platform than open source programmer Dries Buytaert, who is the original creator of the Drupal CMS.

For those not up to speed with Drupal, it is a great open source CMS. It can be used to create anything from small personal blogs to important and powerful corporate and government websites. While WordPress is the blogging CMS for the common blogger, Drupal is the developer’s choice. It has also been described as “the Linux of the internet”, and if Drupal is Linux than Word Press would be equivalent to Windows. It also boasts an extremely active and engaged community, which sets it apart from other, similar platforms.

Buytaert is from Belgium, and his claims to fame other than creating Drupal include founding Acquia, which seeks to be to Drupal what Red Hat is to Linux, and launching Mollom, a state-of-the-art spam-busting service. “Mollom’s purpose is to dramatically reduce the effort of keeping your site clean and the quality of your content high. Currently, Mollom is a spam-killing one-two punch combination of a state-of-the-art spam filter and CAPTCHA server.” Over 4,000 websites are protected by the Mollom service. More than 100,000 messages are being analyzed every day.”

He has a PHD in Computer Science and Engineering from Belgium’s University of Ghent and has won numerous awards, including being voted one of the Top 5 most influential people in open source by MindTouch in 2009. His allegiance to open source has gotten him called “the anti-Bill Gates”, but he himself rejected the tag, blogging that he isn’t comfortable with being branded anti-Microsoft.

For one of the most highly rated programmers in the World, he is surprisingly humble, and has a sense of humour. His website’s somewhat self-depricating bio admits that “sometimes people laugh at his hair, but he is cool with that”. The man is a true geek icon.

Tags: Dries Buytaert, Drupal, microsoft, Open Source