competitive-programming
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Deon Nicholas and the art of getting homework out of the way
A Toronto teenager built software to quiz him on history. Years later, after Forethought’s sale to Zendesk, Deon Nicholas is still working on the same practical question: how much of the busywork can a computer take off your hands?
Walden Yan and the Problem of Giving a Machine the Whole Story
A gold medal in competitive programming taught Walden Yan to spot patterns under pressure. At Cognition, his harder problem is helping an AI engineer remember enough context to finish the job.
Akshat Bubna and the Art of Making Hard Problems Smaller
Before Akshat Bubna helped build an AI cloud, he won an international programming gold medal. The habit that connects those chapters is simple: make a hard problem smaller, then keep going.
Steven Hao and the Problem That Outgrew the Contest
A silver and then a gold medal put him on the programming map. At Cognition, the former Scale AI engineer is asking a harder question: what happens when software can take responsibility for software?
Dmytro Dzhulgakov Learned to Race Code. Now He Races AI Models.
Before he worked on the machinery behind generative AI, Dmytro Dzhulgakov was a Kharkiv student who wrote code for an Intel 8080 and competed against the world’s fastest programmers. At Fireworks AI, the contest has changed, but the clock still matters.
Johnny Ho and the Art of the Useful No
Before he helped turn search into a conversation, Johnny Ho learned to prize the exact answer, the fast decision, and the feature left unbuilt. His career is a study in disciplined velocity.
Prasanna Sankar Keeps Choosing the Hard Problem
The coder behind a campus sensation and a $16.8 billion software company has returned to the keyboard. His career is a study in speed, collapse, recovery and the stubborn appeal of starting over.
Iqbol Temirkhojaev Started Coding at 11. Now He Is Teaching Legal Work to Move Faster.
The Wayco founder's unusual timeline runs from programming Olympiads in Tajikistan to Y Combinator in New York. His most useful lesson is less cinematic: launch sooner, listen harder, and learn the market before polishing the machine.
Nikola Borisov
Nikola Borisov is the co-founder and CEO of Deep Infra, a Palo Alto cloud company that runs open-source AI models as a low-cost, low-latency inference service. A former competitive programmer who scaled messaging backends to hundreds of millions of users at imo.im and helped build HalloApp's founding backend, he bet early that inference, not training, would become the real bottleneck of the AI era. Deep Infra now processes close to five trillion tokens a week and raised a $107M Series B in May 2026 backed by NVIDIA, 500 Global, Felicis and others.
Ying Sheng
Ying Sheng is the co-founder and CEO of RadixArk, an AI infrastructure company that spun out of SGLang, the open-source inference engine she helped create in 2023. SGLang now runs across hundreds of thousands of GPUs and serves trillions of tokens a day for Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, xAI and others. A Stanford computer science PhD and former xAI technical staff who co-led the inference team behind Grok, she launched RadixArk in May 2026 with $100 million in seed funding led by Accel at a $400 million valuation, on a mission to make frontier-level AI infrastructure open and accessible to everyone.
Alex Mashrabov
Alex Mashrabov is the CEO and co-founder of Higgsfield AI, a $1.3B AI video generation unicorn that went from $0 to $50M ARR in five months. A 2x ACM ICPC World Finals competitive programmer who began coding at 10, he previously co-founded AI Factory — acquired by Snap for $166M in 2020 — and later served as Snap's Head of Generative AI. Born in Andijan, Uzbekistan, and trained at Moscow's elite MIPT, he is now building Higgsfield into the infrastructure layer for AI video creation, targeting the moment when most social media video is AI-generated.
Michael Truell
Michael Truell is the 25-year-old co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor — the AI-native code editor that reached $2 billion ARR faster than any SaaS company in history. A former Google intern and MIT dropout who won the ACM/CSTA Cutler-Bell Prize and IOI medals in high school, Truell co-founded Cursor in 2022 with three MIT classmates, launching it publicly in March 2023. By November 2025, Cursor had raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation — and in April 2026, SpaceX secured an option to acquire the company for $60 billion. Truell's north star: replace coding itself with something better.
Scott Wu
Scott Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, the AI company behind Devin - widely recognized as the world's first autonomous AI software engineer. A three-time International Olympiad in Informatics gold medalist from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Wu started coding at age 9, interned at a fintech startup as a high schooler alongside future Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, briefly attended Harvard, then spent five years building Lunchclub as CTO before co-founding Cognition in 2023 with fellow competitive programming champions. Under his leadership, Cognition grew from a 10-person apartment startup to a $10.2 billion company with over 200 employees, acquired Windsurf in July 2025, and raised $675 million in total funding - with Devin's annualized revenue surging from $1 million to $73 million in under a year.
Demi Guo
Demi Guo is the co-founder and CEO of Pika, an AI-powered video generation platform that has raised $135 million and reached a $470 million valuation. A Harvard math-and-CS graduate and Stanford PhD dropout, she holds silver medals from the International Olympiad in Informatics and gold medals from the Math Prize for Girls. Before founding Pika in April 2023, she was the youngest full-time researcher at Meta AI. Her platform, which lets anyone create cinematic videos from a text prompt, reached 16.4 million users and inspired Pika 2.2 features that went viral with an 800% user surge.
Ashish Pratap Singh
Ashish Pratap Singh is an Indian software engineer turned full-time creator who built AlgoMaster - a newsletter, platform, and YouTube channel helping 700,000+ developers crack coding interviews. After stints at Morgan Stanley, Amazon, and Adobe, he quit his SDE-2 role at Amazon US in mid-2024 to return to India and build AlgoMaster.io from scratch. His newsletter grew from zero to 140,000+ subscribers in roughly 12 months, and his GitHub repositories have accumulated 85,000+ stars.
Predrag Gruevski
Predrag Gruevski is an independent software engineer, open-source creator, and Rust ecosystem luminary best known for building Trustfall - a universal query engine that lets you query anything from APIs to LLMs - and cargo-semver-checks, a semantic versioning linter that's becoming a cornerstone of the Rust publish workflow. A former MIT competitive mathematician turned principal engineer at Kensho Technologies, Predrag brings Olympic-level rigor to API design and compiler technology, writing and speaking extensively on correctness-first software development.