Sophia Stel is a 27-year-old Vancouver-based Canadian alt-pop artist, singer, and self-producer whose music blends dreamy synths, auto-tuned alto vocals, skittering breakbeats, and rave-adjacent textures into something critics call the 'sonic lovechild of Ethel Cain and 070 Shake.' Growing up on Vancouver Island in a large religious household with 10 siblings, she taught herself production on GarageBand before building a makeshift studio in a nightclub basement. After years of bartending to fund her art, she broke through with her 2024 debut EP Object Permanence, scored a viral TikTok moment with 'I'll Take It' (8.6M+ Spotify streams), walked the Ann Demeulemeester SS26 runway, graced the NME cover, and in early 2026 became only the second artist signed to A24 Music - all while recording mostly from home on a 2013 MacBook.
Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, known as The Weeknd, is a Canadian singer, songwriter, record producer, and actor who transformed R&B from the shadows of a Scarborough upbringing into a global phenomenon. With 75+ million records sold, a billion-dollar touring empire, and the most-streamed song in Spotify history, he is redefining what a career exit looks like — retiring the Weeknd persona after his 2025 album and film 'Hurry Up Tomorrow', the closing chapter of a dark pop trilogy, to begin again as Abel Tesfaye.
Josh W Comeau is a Montreal-based frontend developer, indie course creator, and one of the most beloved CSS and React educators on the internet. After stints at Unsplash, Shopify, Khan Academy, and Gatsby, he left corporate engineering in 2020 to build interactive, deeply original courses that generated over $550,000 in presale revenue. His CSS for JavaScript Developers and The Joy of React courses have taught more than 28,000 developers through a teaching style that blends interactive widgets, mini-games, and the rare gift of building genuine mental models rather than just showing code.