John Gruber

By his own account in a 2008 interview, he wrote for the student newspaper at Drexel University, eventually becoming its editor, and graduated in 1996.⁠[1]

He has said he worked at the Mac software company Bare Bones Software from 2000 to 2002.⁠[1]

A few months after leaving Bare Bones Software he started Daring Fireball, a columnist-style weblog; he said he felt he needed a weblog of his own. He still writes and produces the site, whose copyright years begin in 2002.⁠[1][2]

He released Markdown on Daring Fireball, a text-to-HTML tool he had written that lets web writers compose in a readable plain-text syntax, which a Perl program then converts to HTML.⁠[3][4]

On December 17, 2004, he released Markdown 1.0.1 under a BSD-style open-source license; the project page credits Aaron Swartz for feedback and testing on the design of its formatting syntax.⁠[4]

By his own account, he worked at Joyent from January 2005 through March 2006 while writing Daring Fireball, and began writing the site full-time after leaving Joyent.⁠[1]

Since 2007 he has released the podcast The Talk Show almost every week.⁠[5]

In May 2012 the show left Dan Benjamin’s 5by5 network and continued on the Mule Radio Syndicate.⁠[6]

In December 2012 he started the company Q Branch with Brent Simmons and Dave Wiskus, and in June 2013 it launched its only product, the iPhone notes app Vesper. In August 2016 they announced that development was ending and the sync server would be shut down.⁠[7]

On Daring Fireball he criticized Apple for showcasing at WWDC 2024, and advertising with the iPhone 16, a “more personalized Siri” that was never actually demonstrated, arguing it was a credibility failure by Apple’s decision-makers rather than a mere delay.⁠[8]

In “X Once Again Marks the Spot” on Daring Fireball, he wrote that X has found its footing again under Elon MuskElon MuskElon Musk is an entrepreneur who founded SpaceX and has long served as chief executive of Tesla; he also took part in creating PayPal, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI. He acquired Twitter in 2022, and his businesses span spaceflight, electric vehicles, energy, artificial intelligence, and social media.Open the full entry’s ownership and that he sees more interesting posts on X than on ThreadsThreadsThreads is a text-sharing social app from Meta built by the Instagram team; launched on July 5, 2023, it lets users log in with their Instagram account and has gradually connected to the fediverse through the ActivityPub protocol, and in June 2026 Meta announced it had reached 500 million monthly active users.Open the full entry, Bluesky and Mastodon combined.⁠[9]

He said discussions of new AI tools and use cases can happen on X, whereas on Bluesky and Mastodon they often turn into arguments, and that Threads rivals X in size but has a weirder algorithm and relatively boring content. He added that the Musk-centric feel of the platform is gone “for now, at least,” and called MastodonMastodonMastodon is free and open-source decentralized social networking software created by Eugen Rochko in 2016; based on the ActivityPub protocol, it forms a federated network of independently run servers. Its user base grew sharply in 2022, and Rochko stepped down as CEO in November 2025.Open the full entry his favorite of the bunch, though with little to see.⁠[9]

He continues to write Daring Fireball and host The Talk Show, whose latest episode, No. 455, was released on September 25, 2026; he also co-hosts the subscription podcast Dithering with Ben Thompson, with two 15-minute episodes a week.⁠[10][11]

Daring Fireball: Official website: https://daringfireball.net/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

X: Public account: https://x.com/gruber (opens in a new window)⁠[9]