.Best Beard

In some circles, Max Ogden is kind of famous. After skipping college, the young coding prodigy was lured from Portland to the Bay Area by tech guru Tim O’Reilly himself, became a civic coder for the prestigious San Francisco nonprofit Code for America, and spearheaded a dizzying number of open-source web projects that have inspired a cult-like Internet following. This award, however, is not for any of that stuff; it’s for his beard. Almost as synonymous with the man as the programmer’s long list of achievements, his facial hair is scraggly, roughly a foot long, and raging orange, contrasting pleasantly with his long blond locks. The end result is what Ogden himself has called “a magnet of serendipity” — a beard that, like his “Fear the Beard” ex-compatriot across the bay, has definitely added to his legend.