If you want to know who a person really is like don't look to his resume or personal references which can and often are larded with flattery and puffery, but ask him what are the top 10 blogs he follows. Of course, you probably need to ask him extemporaneously so he doesn't revise his list to conform with your expectations of him.
What if he just uses aggregators and doesn't really follow individual blogs? That's what I've drifted towards recently... I couldn't name 1 blog I follow specifically, much less 10. But if you wanted to know the top 10 aggregator sites, it'd be something like:<p>1. <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com</a><p>2. <a href="http://programming.reddit.com" rel="nofollow">http://programming.reddit.com</a><p>3. <a href="http://machinelearning.reddit.com" rel="nofollow">http://machinelearning.reddit.com</a><p>4. <a href="http://artificial.reddit.com" rel="nofollow">http://artificial.reddit.com</a><p>5. <a href="http://www.slashdot.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.slashdot.org</a><p>6. <a href="http://planet.trilug.org" rel="nofollow">http://planet.trilug.org</a><p>7. <a href="http://datasets.reddit.com" rel="nofollow">http://datasets.reddit.com</a><p>8. <a href="http://compsci.reddit.com" rel="nofollow">http://compsci.reddit.com</a><p>9. <a href="http://sysor.reddit.com" rel="nofollow">http://sysor.reddit.com</a><p>10. <a href="http://economics.reddit.com" rel="nofollow">http://economics.reddit.com</a><p>What would one deduce from that?
>> If you want to know who a person really is like<p>I don't know about you, but the way <i>I</i> do that is strike up a conversation with said person.<p>FWIW, I follow a number of people whose primary programming languages I don't use.