Luca Rossi is an Italian software engineer, entrepreneur, and writer based in Rome who turned a side project into one of the world's most-read engineering leadership newsletters. After co-founding and scaling travel startup Wanderio to 25M+ customers over eight years, he launched Refactoring in 2020 - a newsletter covering engineering management, software teams, and tech leadership. It now reaches 172,000+ subscribers, ranks in the top 10 Substack business newsletters, and generates approximately $300K/year in revenue, all operated solo. He also hosts the Refactoring Podcast, featuring guests like DHH, Kent Beck, and Camille Fournier, and in 2025 released Tolaria, a free open-source macOS knowledge base app built entirely with AI coding tools.
Dr. James Stanier is a computer science PhD turned engineering leader, author of three books on engineering management, and the mind behind The Engineering Manager newsletter with nearly 30,000 subscribers. He scaled Brandwatch's engineering team from startup to a $450M acquisition, led hundreds of engineers at Shopify, and now serves as CTO for the veterinary division at Nordhealth. His work distills what it actually takes to go from writing code to running organizations - without losing the technical edge.
Will Larson is a veteran engineering executive, author of four books on engineering leadership, and the voice behind the long-running newsletter Irrational Exuberance. He has scaled engineering teams at Digg, Uber, Stripe, Calm, and Carta, and currently serves as CTO at Imprint. His books - An Elegant Puzzle, Staff Engineer, The Engineering Executive's Primer, and Crafting Engineering Strategy - have sold tens of thousands of copies and are considered essential reading in the engineering leadership community.
Azhar Hussain is a Karachi-based software engineering leader with over 25 years of experience building and scaling engineering teams across Pakistan and the Gulf. He is the co-founder and former CTO of ChargeUp, a Pakistani fintech-EV startup, and currently serves as CTO of Aladdin Informatics, a company digitizing small retail stores across Pakistan. A 3-time hackathon champion, angel investor, prolific mentor, and IAB member at FAST-NUCES, Azhar sits at the intersection of enterprise architecture, startup culture, and Pakistan's growing tech ecosystem.