This list is not exhaustive at all; the second list (of people who are not famous but I have heard of and/or know) is particularly non-exhaustive. read more
RoR developer here (not Silicon Valley, not even USA). The main reason is UNIX, plain and simple. We spend a lot of time with terminals. In my case I work with two big projects. So I have one desktop for each one with: Textmate with all the code source. One iTerm divided with 3 panels. read more
The best programming jobs in Silicon Valley — from the plum internships to the regular hires with the big signing bonuses — go to the coders who are active in the software development community, not to people who submit resumes over the transom. read more