xkcd
Randall Munroe's webcomic, self-described as 'a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language,' whose programming strips became shared reference points across the software culture.
Tools
The compilers, IDEs, and systems that programmers actually used.
379 entries, all primary-sourced
Symfony
SensioLabs' modular PHP framework and set of reusable components, first released in 2005, whose decoupled packages underpin Laravel, Drupal, and much of the modern PHP ecosystem.
Apache Hadoop
Open-source framework for reliable, distributed storage and batch processing of very large data sets across clusters of commodity machines, which helped launch the big-data era.
Chubby
Google's Paxos-backed lock service that provides distributed locks and a small reliable file store for coordinating loosely-coupled systems.
NumPy
The N-dimensional array library that unified Python's earlier array packages and became the foundation of the entire scientific and machine-learning ecosystem in Python.
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Amazon's durable, pay-per-use object store, launched in March 2006, which became foundational cloud plumbing for storing and serving data over the web.
PowerShell
PowerShell is Microsoft's command-line shell and scripting language, first released in 2006. Unlike text-based Unix shells, it passes structured .NET objects through its pipeline. Originally Windows-only, it became cross-platform open-source software with PowerShell Core in 2016.
Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
Amazon's on-demand rentable virtual servers, launched in beta in August 2006 and originally built on Xen, billed by the hour - the service that made the cloud concrete for developers.
jQuery
John Resig's 2006 JavaScript library that smoothed over browser inconsistencies and made DOM manipulation simple, becoming nearly ubiquitous on the web for a decade.
Sass
The CSS preprocessor created by Hampton Catlin and collaborators in 2006, which adds variables, nesting, mixins, and functions to stylesheets and compiles them down to plain CSS.
Neo4j
The leading graph database, which stores data as nodes and relationships and traverses connected data efficiently, introducing the Cypher query language.
tmux
tmux is a terminal multiplexer that lets many terminals be created, accessed, and controlled from a single screen, organized into sessions, windows, and panes. Sessions persist when detached, so work can be reattached later, and tmux is heavily scriptable from the command line.
VirtualBox
A free, cross-platform type-2 hypervisor first released in 2007 and now developed by Oracle, widely used to run virtual machines on desktop computers.
iPhone
Apple's multi-touch smartphone, introduced on January 9, 2007 and shipped that June, that combined a phone, an iPod, and an internet device and went on to create the modern mobile-app ecosystem.
Mobile Safari
The iPhone's WebKit-based web browser, which brought the full desktop web to phones and, before the App Store existed, was Apple's original model for third-party apps as web applications.
KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine)
The Linux feature, merged into the kernel in 2007, that turns the Linux kernel itself into a hypervisor using hardware virtualization extensions.
RabbitMQ
RabbitMQ is a widely deployed open-source message broker, originally built around AMQP and written in Erlang. It routes messages between producers and consumers using exchanges, queues, and bindings, and grew into a multi-protocol messaging and streaming broker.
Hacker News
Y Combinator's startup-and-programming news aggregator, launched by Paul Graham in 2007, known for its karma points, Show HN posts, and terse moderation guidelines.
CUDA
NVIDIA's parallel-computing platform and C/C++ language extension, released in 2007, that let general-purpose code run on the GPU. CUDA turned the graphics chip into a programmable parallel processor and became the software moat behind NVIDIA's dominance in AI compute.
ggplot2
Hadley Wickham's R visualization package, first released in 2007, which implements Leland Wilkinson's Grammar of Graphics as a layered API and reshaped how data visualization is expressed across many languages.
Valgrind
Valgrind is a dynamic binary instrumentation framework whose best-known tool, Memcheck, runs unmodified programs under a synthetic CPU to detect memory errors and leaks in C and C++ software.
Sinatra
Blake Mizerany's 2007 Ruby microframework, a small domain-specific language for mapping HTTP routes to blocks of code, which inspired a generation of minimal frameworks like Flask and Express.
Android
Android is the Linux-based, open-source mobile operating system unveiled by Google and the Open Handset Alliance in 2007 and shipped on devices from 2008. It became the most widely used operating system in the world.
ROS (Robot Operating System)
The open-source robotics framework begun at Willow Garage in 2007, whose nodes, topics, and publish/subscribe graph became the de facto standard for robot software.
Android SDK
The Android software development kit: the platform APIs, build tools, command-line utilities, and the device emulator used to compile, build, and test Android applications.
Apache HBase
Open-source wide-column NoSQL database modeled on Google's Bigtable, running on top of Hadoop and HDFS to give random, real-time read/write access to very large tables.
Apache ZooKeeper
An open-source coordination service for distributed systems, providing configuration, naming, leader election, and locks through a replicated hierarchical store.
Bitbucket
A code-hosting service that began as a Mercurial host, was acquired by Atlassian, added git, and competes with GitHub through deep Jira integration.
Gerrit
A web-based code-review system built on git, originating at Google, that enforces review before changes are allowed to land.
Gradle
A JVM build tool using a Groovy or Kotlin DSL instead of XML, with incremental builds; the standard for Android and many JVM projects.
pandas
The Python library that brought a labeled, spreadsheet-like data structure (the DataFrame) to scientific computing and became the standard workhorse for data wrangling and analysis.
Sublime Text
A fast, proprietary cross-platform source-code editor first released by Jon Skinner in 2008. It popularized features such as the Command Palette, Goto Anything fuzzy navigation, and pervasive multiple-cursor editing that later editors adopted.
Cocoa Touch
The iOS application layer, an adaptation of the Mac's Cocoa environment for touch devices, made up principally of the UIKit and Foundation frameworks running atop the Objective-C runtime.
UIKit
Apple's imperative user-interface framework for iOS, providing UIView, view controllers, and event handling, and the foundation for native iPhone and iPad apps from 2008 onward.
iOS
Apple's mobile operating system, launched with the iPhone in 2007 as iPhone OS and renamed iOS in 2010; its software development kit, opened to third-party developers in March 2008, made native apps possible.
Hyper-V
Microsoft's type-1 hypervisor, first shipped in 2008, built into Windows Server and Windows and used as a foundation for Azure.
Jinja
A fast, expressive, and extensible templating engine for Python, created by Armin Ronacher and maintained by the Pallets project. Jinja (often called Jinja2) renders templates with Python-like syntax and provides autoescaping, sandboxed execution, and template inheritance. It is the default template engine of Flask.
Apache Cassandra
A distributed wide-column store born at Facebook that combines Dynamo's availability and partitioning with BigTable's data model, built for huge write-heavy workloads with no single point of failure.
Protocol Buffers
Protocol Buffers (protobuf) is Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral mechanism for serializing structured data, combining a compact binary wire format with an interface definition language and a code generator. It is the default payload format for gRPC.
The App Store
Apple's curated marketplace for iOS apps, opened on July 10, 2008 with more than 500 native applications and a 70/30 revenue split, which established the modern model for distributing mobile software.
LXC (Linux Containers)
A userspace toolkit that uses Linux cgroups and namespaces to create and manage system containers; the first complete container runtime and the one Docker originally built on.
Google Chrome
Google's web browser, launched in 2008 on the WebKit rendering engine and the V8 JavaScript engine, which went on to become the most widely used browser.
V8
Google's high-performance open source JavaScript engine, released with Chrome in 2008, which compiles JavaScript to native machine code and powers both Chrome and Node.js.
Stack Overflow
The question-and-answer site for programmers, launched in 2008 by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, that became the default reference for working developers through voting, reputation, and aggressive deduplication.
Dalvik
Dalvik was Android's original virtual machine, a register-based VM that ran applications compiled to the compact DEX (Dalvik Executable) bytecode format. It was later superseded by ART.
Google Play
Google Play, launched as the Android Market in 2008 and rebranded in 2012, is Android's official app store and digital distribution channel. It introduced the 70/30 developer revenue split that became an industry norm.
Jekyll
The Ruby static site generator Tom Preston-Werner released in 2008; as the engine behind GitHub Pages it popularized blog-aware, file-based site generation.
Chef
Adam Jacob's configuration-management tool, first released in 2009, in which infrastructure is described as code using a Ruby-based DSL of recipes and cookbooks built from declarative resources.