John Gruber

Writer and blogger, best known as the most influential Apple commentator in the English-speaking internet. He has published on Daring Fireball since 2002 and is the creator of Markdown.

What He Built

Daring Fireball is a one-man media property: no newsroom, no investors, no click optimization. Gruber writes about Apple, design, technology, and occasionally baseball with a precision that made him the most frequently cited Apple commentator of his era. His writing style shaped how tech blogging sounds: compact, direct, often loaded with subtext.

His most durable work, however, is Markdown, a text-formatting language released in 2004 and now used by millions of developers, writers, and tools, from GitHub to Obsidian to Slack.

Daring Fireball as a Model

Gruber shows that one person with a clear voice and a niche audience can build a sustainable single-author media business. Funding comes from sponsorships in the classic blog format, not from hard paywalls. Rarely copied successfully, often admired.

Connections

• Markdown - his most important technical creation
• File over App - Markdown as philosophy: text without vendor lock-in
• Aaron Swartz - collaborated with Gruber on early Markdown syntax

Sources

• Daring Fireball: Markdown - official Markdown documentation page (2026-04-05)