Dominic Nguyen is the co-founder of Chromatic, the company behind Storybook - the open source workshop used by tens of thousands of frontend teams including Airbnb, Microsoft, IBM and Shopify to build UI components in isolation. A designer by training, he turned a developer tool with a devoted community into a self-sustaining business by selling visual testing and review services that fund the open source project itself. His focus now is what AI means for design systems, including Storybook's Model Context Protocol work.
Mohammad Danish Siddiqui is a senior frontend engineer at Intuit in Milton, Ontario, who has spent more than a decade shipping web and mobile products across Pakistan, the UAE, and Canada. He calls himself a software engineer by career, an aspiring data scientist by education, and a game developer by passion. He built travel platforms at Seera Group, joined Wave HQ after crossing the world from Dubai, open-sourced a NativeScript toast library used by other developers, and writes book notes and career advice for engineers on the side.
Sam Bhagwat is the founder and CEO of Mastra, an open-source TypeScript framework for building AI agents that pulls in millions of monthly downloads. He earlier co-founded Gatsby, the React-based web framework used by hundreds of thousands of developers and later acquired by Netlify. A Stanford economics grad and longtime open-source builder, he wrote 'Modular: The Web's New Architecture' and 'Principles of Building AI Agents,' the latter dubbed by one YC founder 'the most popular book in San Francisco.' Mastra went through Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch and raised a $22M Series A led by Spark Capital.
Mozilla builds Firefox and a family of privacy-first internet products with a single, stubborn goal: keep the web open, private, and not owned by anyone. Spun out of Netscape in 1998 and run by a for-profit corporation wholly owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla competes with the largest companies on earth while answering to a mission instead of shareholders.
Jeff Delaney is the creator of Fireship, a YouTube channel with over 4 million subscribers known for delivering fast-paced, entertaining programming tutorials - most famously the '100 Seconds of Code' series. Based in Phoenix, Arizona, he turned a side project teaching Firebase and Angular into one of the most influential developer education platforms on the internet, complemented by his course platform fireship.io and an 8,000-member developer Slack community.
Sandeep Panda is the Co-Founder and CTO of Hashnode, a developer-first blogging and community platform that lets software engineers own their content and publish on custom domains. Founded in 2016 alongside Syed Fazle Rahman, Hashnode has grown to serve 3M+ monthly readers and 10M+ monthly views, backed by Sequoia Capital India's Surge, Salesforce Ventures, and angel investors including Naval Ravikant and Guillermo Rauch (Vercel). A graduate of IIIT Bhubaneswar with a background in web development and technical writing, Sandeep has authored books on AngularJS and HTML5, and is now building Bug0, an AI-native end-to-end testing platform.
Nicolas Meunier is the Founder and CEO of talent.io, a Paris-based reverse recruitment platform that flips the traditional hiring model on its head - instead of candidates chasing companies, vetted tech companies apply to pre-screened software engineers. A Stanford-trained computer scientist and Ecole Polytechnique alumnus, Meunier co-founded talent.io in 2015 after previously co-founding CruiseWise (acquired by TripAdvisor) and working as a senior software engineer at Cruise Critic. Under his leadership, talent.io has grown to serve 2,000+ tech companies and 150,000+ developers across 8+ European cities, raising $11M in funding from top investors including Alven Capital and Ventech.
Declan Chidlow, known online as Vale, is a Perth-based front-end developer, writer, and photographer who champions the open web from the front of the front-end. Armed with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, he builds accessible digital experiences and publishes technical articles across Smashing Magazine, CSS-Tricks, and Piccalilli — while also shipping quirky open-source tools like BritCSS (CSS for those who refuse to spell 'colour' without the u) and Adduce, a Rust-powered static site generator. When not coding or writing, he can be found on a unicycle.
Shawn 'Swyx' Wang is a Singaporean-American developer, writer, and community builder who left a $350K hedge fund career to teach himself to code at 30 - then coined the term 'AI Engineer,' built one of tech's most influential AI podcasts (Latent Space), and launched the AI Engineer conference series that put 15,000 developers in rooms together to figure out what this job actually is.
Simon Grimm is a German developer educator and solo founder who has spent over a decade teaching web developers to build mobile apps. Best known for Galaxies.dev and his earlier Devdactic blog, he was voted the #1 React Native video creator by the community. Beyond tutorials, he's building Tiny Harvest - a cozy idle farm RPG - entirely by himself. He went fully self-employed in 2017 and hasn't looked back.
Simon Hoiberg is a Danish serial entrepreneur, software engineer, and content creator based in Zurich, Switzerland. He left a $300K/year freelancing career to bootstrap a portfolio of SaaS products - including FeedHive (AI social media scheduling), Aidbase (AI customer support), LinkDrip (link attribution), TinyKiwi, and SignupGate - achieving $1M+ combined ARR. He grew his Twitter/X following to 200K+ organically and teaches React Native development through Galaxies.dev, reaching 100,000+ developers. Known for radical transparency about both wins and failures, Simon openly documents his entire entrepreneurial journey.
Marcy Sutton Todd is a senior frontend infrastructure engineer at Khan Academy and one of the most recognized voices in web accessibility. A former Deque Systems engineer who helped shape axe-core, she pivoted from photojournalism to web development, built the Testing Accessibility workshop series, and has spent over a decade making the web usable for everyone - framing it as a civil rights issue, not a compliance checkbox.
Simon Støvring is a Danish indie iOS developer and principal iOS engineer at Framna, best known for creating Scriptable — the app that lets anyone automate their iPhone with JavaScript. By day he architects mobile apps for a Nordic agency; by night he ships beloved tools like Runestone (a Tree-sitter-powered text editor), Data Jar, and Jayson. His work sits at the intersection of power-user utility and delightful craftsmanship, earning him a loyal following among iOS enthusiasts, automation nerds, and developers worldwide.
Simon Willison is a British software engineer, open source creator, and AI commentator best known for co-creating the Django web framework and building Datasette, the open-source data exploration tool. He coined the term 'prompt injection' in 2022 and popularized 'AI slop' in 2024 - a word later named Merriam-Webster's 2025 Word of the Year. Through his prolific blog (active since 2002), newsletter with 54,000+ subscribers, and 100+ open source tools, he is one of the most influential independent voices at the intersection of LLMs and open source software.
Addy Osmani is an Irish software engineer and engineering leader who spent nearly 14 years shaping the modern web at Google Chrome - leading the teams behind Lighthouse, Core Web Vitals, Chrome DevTools, Puppeteer, and PageSpeed Insights. Now Director at Google Cloud AI, he bridges Gemini, Vertex AI, and the Agent Development Kit for millions of developers worldwide. Author of multiple O'Reilly books and curator of the Elevate newsletter, Osmani's work has touched over 20 million developers and his open-source projects have become industry standards.
Cassidy Williams is a Chicago-based software engineer, Senior Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub, and one of the most recognizable voices in the frontend developer community. Known online as @cassidoo, she runs the widely-read weekly newsletter 'rendezvous with cassidoo,' builds mechanical keyboards, mentors early-career engineers, and has spoken everywhere from TED stages to the United Nations. She's a Glamour '35 Women Under 35 Changing the Tech Industry' honoree, a LinkedIn Top Professional, and a firm believer that you get a lot by giving.
Dominik Dorfmeister, known online as TkDodo, is an Austrian software engineer, core maintainer of TanStack Query (formerly React Query), and one of the most influential voices in the React ecosystem. Based in Vienna, he works as a Frontend Engineer at Sentry while helping shape how millions of developers approach server state management. His blog at tkdodo.eu - built on the philosophy that 'if I get a question three times, I write the answer down' - has become essential reading for React developers worldwide. With over 3.5 years maintaining TanStack Query (which now appears in nearly 20% of all React applications), conference talks from Berlin to Paris, and a co-created official course at query.gg, Dominik bridges the gap between library internals and everyday developer experience.
Guillermo Rauch is the founder and CEO of Vercel, the frontend cloud platform that powers millions of developers and some of the world's most visited websites. A self-taught engineer from Lanús, Argentina who never finished high school, Rauch built two of JavaScript's most widely used open-source libraries (Socket.IO and Mongoose), co-created Next.js — the world's most popular React framework — and turned Vercel into a $9.3 billion company with $340 million ARR. He is also one of the most prolific angel investors in tech, with over 700 known investments, and recently launched v0, an AI-powered coding tool with over 3.5 million users.
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.
Kent C. Dodds is a world-renowned web development educator, open source engineer, and entrepreneur based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Creator of React Testing Library and the Testing Library ecosystem, he left a staff engineering role at PayPal in 2019 to build a self-employed education empire spanning EpicReact.dev, EpicWeb.dev, TestingJavaScript.com, and now EpicAI.pro. Recognized as a Google Developer Expert, Microsoft MVP, and GitHub Star, he has taught tens of thousands of developers through hands-on workshops, books, courses, and his long-running newsletter. Father of six and an adrenaline enthusiast who snowboards and rides a onewheel, Kent believes that kindness and teaching compound faster than any technology trend.
Lea Verou is a Greek-American web standards leader, MIT researcher, and creator tools advocate whose fingerprints are on the web itself. She has designed web technologies now baked into every major browser, built 30+ open-source projects with nearly 2 billion npm downloads (including PrismJS and Color.js), authored the bestselling CSS Secrets (O'Reilly, 2015), and served as an elected W3C Technical Architecture Group member. A PhD candidate at MIT CSAIL in Human-Computer Interaction and Programming Language Design, she consults for Google, Mozilla, and Stripe, leads the State of HTML survey, and has delivered 100+ conference talks worldwide - always live-coding.
Lee Robinson is a developer educator and engineering leader who spent five years at Vercel scaling Next.js to over a million monthly active developers, rising from individual contributor to VP of Developer Experience. He now serves as Head of AI Education at Cursor, teaching developers how to build software with AI-powered tools. Known for creating free courses like Mastering Next.js and React 2025, his newsletter 'Optimism (for the web)' and 234K+ Twitter following reflect his belief that great technology should be easy to understand and interesting to learn.
Mark Erikson is the primary maintainer of Redux and creator of Redux Toolkit - the tools that power state management in millions of React applications worldwide. Known online as @acemarke, he became the de facto keeper of Redux in 2016 when Dan Abramov handed off the project. Since then, he has rebuilt Redux's documentation from the ground up, designed the hooks API in React-Redux, and created Redux Toolkit to eliminate the boilerplate that once made Redux notorious. He is a Senior Front-End Engineer at Replay.io and a tireless community fixture - answering questions on Discord, Reddit, Bluesky, and anywhere else developers congregate online.
Sarah Drasner is a Senior Director of Engineering at Google, where she leads the Core Developer Web Infrastructure powering Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Workspace. A rare hybrid of fine artist turned technologist, she spent 15+ years shaping how the web moves - as a Vue.js core team member, staff writer at CSS-Tricks, creator of the Night Owl VS Code theme (used by millions), and author of both 'SVG Animations' (O'Reilly) and 'Engineering Management for the Rest of Us'. Before Google, she was VP of Developer Experience at Netlify and a Principal Lead at Microsoft Azure. She is an award-winning speaker, teacher on Frontend Masters, and co-organizer of ConcatenateConf, a free conference for Nigerian and Kenyan developers.
Scott Jehl is a Senior Software Engineer on the Web Performance team at Squarespace, a 20-year veteran of the front-end web who helped define modern responsive and performant design. He authored 'Responsible Responsive Design' (A Book Apart, 2014) and co-authored 'Designing with Progressive Enhancement' (2010), created foundational open-source tools like Respond.js, loadCSS, and Picturefill, and recently led the effort that brought lazy loading to HTML video and audio elements - an official web standard as of March 2026. He speaks globally, teaches online, and believes the web should work fast for everyone, everywhere.
Scott Tolinski is a web developer, podcaster, and educator best known as co-host of Syntax.fm - widely regarded as the most popular web development podcast in the world. He founded Level Up Tutorials in 2012 after a breakdancing injury sidelined him, building it into a library of 2,000+ video tutorials with 350,000+ subscribers before it was acquired by Sentry. Now serving as Executive Producer at Sentry, Scott co-hosts Syntax alongside Wes Bos, releasing two episodes per week covering JavaScript, SvelteKit, CSS, and modern web development. Outside the keyboard, he is a dedicated B-boy (breakdancer) and avid snowboarder based in Denver, Colorado.
Surma (known online as @DasSurma) is a Principal Software Engineer at Shopify focused on developer experience and monorepo architecture. A former Google Chrome Team Web Advocate, he is best known for making WebAssembly and Web Workers approachable through open-source tools like Comlink (12k+ GitHub stars), Squoosh, and PROXX. He co-hosts the 'Off The Main Thread' podcast with Jake Archibald and publishes deep technical articles at surma.dev. Based in Bristol, UK, Surma has spent his career removing the friction between developers and the harder parts of the web platform.
Swizec Teller is a Slovenian-American software engineer, bestselling author, and educator based in San Francisco who has spent 20+ years turning hard-won startup experience into actionable career wisdom. Best known for his Senior Mindset newsletter and books like 'Scaling Fast' and 'Senior Engineer Mindset,' he teaches engineers how to stop writing code and start building leverage. Currently building web UX for gene sequencing at Plasmidsaurus, he's the rare person who codes all day and then writes about coding all evening - and makes that seem entirely reasonable.