Thorsten Ball is a German software engineer, author, and technical educator best known for his self-published books 'Writing an Interpreter in Go' and 'Writing a Compiler in Go', which have become go-to resources for developers wanting to understand programming language internals. With over two decades of professional software development experience, he currently works at Sourcegraph on Amp, an AI-powered coding agent. He also writes the weekly newsletter 'Register Spill', covering systems programming, developer tools, and the intersection of AI with software engineering.
Andrew Kelley is the creator of the Zig programming language and president of the Zig Software Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit he founded in 2020. In 2018, he walked away from a senior engineering role at OkCupid to work on Zig full-time on donations alone - a bet that has since attracted $512,000+ in corporate pledges, spawned production-grade projects like Bun and TigerBeetle, and built one of the most passionate communities in systems programming. He writes the 'Zig Zag' newsletter covering Zig and systems programming.