Since I put up the short list submission page1 for Coders at Work a week and a half ago, I’ve received 162 short lists of sixteen names. You can see which programmers appear on the most short lists on this page. Thank you to everyone who took the time to submit a list.
For the next step in my selection process I’ve put together a page on which I’ve lumped the potential interview subjects into various categories such as “Old school Unix hackers”, “New school Unix hackers”, “Language designers”, and so forth. My theory is that it’ll be more interesting to read interviews with different kinds of programmers than a bunch of interviews with people who’ve all done the same basic kind of work. It’s also a useful way to identify potential interviewees — I can look at each category and ask, is there someone not on this list who’d be a better representative of the category?
As usual, there are ways you can help me out, if you’re so inclined. I enumerate them on the categorization page but basically they are to send me email or leave a comment nominating someone as the best representative of a category, helping me categorize the folks I’ve already got, and suggesting interesting categories that I don’t have yet.
1. I’ve still not been able to get this page working in IE, mostly due to the lack of any easy way to run IE myself. If any Javascript guru wants to let me know what changes I need to make to my code to make it work in IE I’ll be forever grateful.
A billion monkeys can't be wrong 
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