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.
Alex Russell is a Partner Product Architect at Microsoft Edge and Blink API OWNER who spent 13 years at Google shaping the modern web. He co-created Dojo Toolkit, coined the term 'Progressive Web Apps' alongside Frances Berriman in 2015, and led the delivery of Service Workers, Web Components, ES6 Promises and Classes, Push Notifications, and Project Fugu. A three-time elected member of the W3C Technical Architecture Group and decade-long TC39 representative, Russell writes the newsletter 'Infrequently Noted' where he advocates relentlessly for a fast, open, and equitable web - especially for the billions on budget Android devices that the developer community tends to forget.
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.
Jake Archibald is a web platform engineer at Mozilla working on Firefox, and one of the most recognisable voices in web standards. Originally a Flash developer turned BBC JavaScript engineer, he helped define the modern web's offline capabilities as one of the editors of the Service Worker specification. He spent years as a Developer Advocate at Google Chrome, co-hosted the HTTP 203 podcast with Paul Lewis, and delivered one of the most-watched browser internals talks ever - 'In The Loop' at JSConf.Asia 2018. He resigned from Google in 2023, joined Mozilla, and continues pushing the web forward with the same irreverent clarity that made him a developer favourite.
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.
Tanner Linsley is a Salt Lake City-based software engineer, open source creator, and founder of TanStack - the ecosystem behind React Query, TanStack Router, TanStack Table, TanStack Form, and TanStack Start. Co-founder of Nozzle.io, an enterprise SEO platform, Tanner built a multi-million-download open source empire by solving real problems he faced every day, pioneering headless, framework-agnostic, fully type-safe libraries now used by Fortune 500 companies including Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Walmart, and Target.
Wes Bos is a full-stack JavaScript developer, educator, and course creator from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He has taught over 500,000 developers worldwide through his free and paid online courses covering JavaScript, CSS, React, and Node.js. His flagship free course JavaScript30 has over 682,000 enrollments. He co-hosts the popular web development podcast Syntax.fm with Scott Tolinski and CJ Reynolds. His course business has generated over $10M in revenue, largely as a solo operation with a free-tier marketing strategy that has built a massive, loyal audience.