We wanted to establish a list of some of the best Twitter personalities to follow about DevOps, web performance, and development. Not all of these people are thought leaders, and some of them reject that kind of title, and many of them are leading by example and their work instead of writing about what they want to see in the world, but we think there’s a lot of value in their wisdom. If we missed anyone that we should have included, please let us know in the comments and we’ll add them in an update next week!

@jasonh – Jason Hoffman founded Joyent, and is one of the leading voices today about how to scale and provision your infrastructure. While he occasionally writes down what he’s working on and what’s so interesting about it, he also reflects on how far the cloud and the mission of performance has come over the last decade. 

@joestump – Joe Stump was the Lead Architect at Digg, and a co-founder at SimpleGeo. He’s now the CTO of Sprint.ly, a solution for product management and development. Plus, he’s a Tracelytics customer, so you know he has brilliant insight into application performance! 

@allspaw – Etsy’s CTO John Allspaw is well known from his time at Yahoo (Flickr) and Etsy, and an author of two books, including Web Operations, which we discussed in our earlier post about DevOps Reading Material, and you should absolutely be following him if you’re interested in anything about this field.

@mrhinkle – Mark Hinkle – Mark is the Director of Cloud Computing Community at Citrix, and frequently tweets about a number of topics in the DevOps, open source, and cloud worlds. 

@bcantrill – Brian Cantrill – Brian Cantrill is the inventor of dtrace, one of the standard packages for understanding system and application performance. He spoke at Surge 2011 on building cloud-based analytics systems, and works at Joyent. 

@damonedwards – Damon Edwards – Normally seen at http://dtosolutions.com and http://dev2ops.org, Damon is one of the people who is doing a lot to help us all figure out what DevOps really means and how to execute it well.

@jesserobbins – Jesse Robbins – Jesse is the founding CEO of Opscode, and tweets regularly about Chef and other technologies that make working in the cloud much easier. He’s also closely associated with the Velocity Conference. 

@postwait – Theo Schlossnagle – The CEO of OmniTI, Theo is well known for organizing conferences like Surge, other projects, and products to help expand the reach of developers and operations professionals . 

@tracelytics – While we don’t love promoting ourselves, it’d be silly to not acknowledge that most of what we write, say, and do is directly useful to the people in our field. Between our process of open-sourcing some of our product features, reviewing performance and scalability issues related to the cloud, and helping expose the best content online about the field.

@devops_borat – More humor than serious, devops_borat is still useful for insightful quotes into any team’s operations such as “Good thing is on Internet nobody know you are devops ninja.”

Who did we miss? Let us know in the comments and we’ll add them to the post in an update section.

Curator's note: You have to include in this list, Kris Buytaert, John Vincent, and Patrick Dubois, the godfather of DevOps.

(Photo Credit: ricky_artigas)