Ward Cunningham

Ward Cunningham is an American computer programmer who created the first wiki and co-developed the concept of technical debt.

WikiWikiWeb: WikiWikiWeb is the first wiki, created by Ward Cunningham in 1995 for collaborative software-design discussion. Cunningham built this site to let Portland Pattern Repository participants edit pages directly.
Wiki markup: Wiki markup is a lightweight notation for formatting and linking pages in wiki software. Cunningham’s WikiWikiWeb used simple conventions that made page creation and linking easy.
Kent Beck: Kent Beck is an American software engineer who helped create extreme programming and test-driven development. Beck collaborated with Cunningham on extreme programming and related software practices.
Tim Berners-Lee: Tim Berners-Lee is the British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web. The Web began as a linked information system; Cunningham made direct collaborative editing its defining feature.
Wiki: A wiki is a website whose pages can be created and edited collaboratively through a web browser. Cunningham’s first wiki established the form later adopted by many collaborative websites.
Version control: Version control records changes to files over time and supports comparing or restoring earlier versions. Wiki histories make collaborative edits traceable, a problem also addressed by version-control systems.
Erich Gamma: Erich Gamma is a Swiss software engineer known for co-authoring the book Design Patterns. Gamma’s pattern work connects to the community Cunningham hosted on the Portland Pattern Repository.
Hypertext: Hypertext is text containing links that connect documents or passages nonlinearly. Wiki pages extend hypertext by allowing contributors to create and revise linked content.
Technical debt: Technical debt is the future cost of choosing a quick or limited software solution over a more durable one. Cunningham introduced the metaphor to explain the costs of postponing software design improvements.
Refactoring: Refactoring changes a program’s internal structure without changing its observable behavior. It is one way to repay technical debt while preserving software functionality.

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Jimmy WalesRelated: Cunningham’s wiki concept supplied the collaborative editing model used by Wikipedia.