Amet Alvirde is a founder and software engineer based in Mexico City, associated with Render - the cloud deployment platform that hit a $1.5 billion valuation after its $100 million Series C extension in February 2026. A long-time Linux advocate, TypeScript developer, and Fullscreen content creator since 2012, he maintains a public digital garden of philosophical writing in Spanish, shoots street photography on a Sony a7iv, and plays guitar. His GitHub projects span fitness data tooling, trading system analysis, and personal infrastructure - a practitioner who builds for himself as readily as for the platform serving 4.5 million developers.
Felix Kjellberg, known online as PewDiePie, is a Swedish creator who spent a decade as YouTube's most-subscribed individual and then quietly walked away from the algorithm. He now lives in Japan with his wife Marzia and their son Bjorn, posting irregular videos about parenting, Linux, self-hosted AI, and life off the publishing treadmill.
Gary Lerhaupt is VP of Product Architecture at Salesforce leading Agent Interoperability and Orchestration for Agentforce. He co-founded Clockwise, the AI calendar company used by Uber, Netflix, and Atlassian, and was a founding engineer at RelateIQ (acquired by Salesforce for ~$390M). Earlier in his career he created DKMS, the Linux kernel module framework still baked into most Linux distributions today. He holds a BS from Ohio State and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford.
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) is a Danish programmer, entrepreneur, and racing driver best known for creating Ruby on Rails - the open-source web framework that powered GitHub, Shopify, Airbnb, and thousands of other companies. As CTO and co-owner of 37signals (makers of Basecamp and HEY email), he is one of tech's most outspoken critics of venture capital culture, cloud computing excess, and hustle-culture mythology. A 12-time Le Mans competitor with a class championship in 2014, DHH is also a bestselling author (REWORK, Remote) and a prolific open-source contributor whose side projects routinely reshape developer culture.
Nat Friedman is a serial founder, investor, and tech executive best known for co-founding Xamarin and serving as CEO of GitHub, where he launched Copilot. After leaving GitHub in 2021, he co-founded NFDG, a $1.1B AI venture fund with Daniel Gross, launched the Vesuvius Challenge to decode ancient scrolls using machine learning, and joined Meta's Superintelligence Labs as VP of Product and Applied Research in 2025.
Hamza Muhammad Khan is a Karachi-based DevOps and cloud engineer who climbed from supporting small-scale WordPress deployments to managing infrastructure at DigitalOcean as an Engineer II before moving into banking-sector DevOps at Bank Al Habib Limited. Educated at NED University (Master's in Computer Science, 2023) and the University of Karachi (Bachelor's in Computer Software Engineering, 2019), he specializes in Linux administration, Kubernetes, Docker, and cloud platform operations - and moonlights as a blockchain tinkerer and machine-learning experimenter on GitHub.
Brendan Gregg is an Australian systems performance engineer at OpenAI, where he works on datacenter optimizations for ChatGPT. He invented flame graphs and the USE Method, pioneered eBPF observability, and is the author of landmark books including 'Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud'. His work is credited with saving the industry over $1 billion in compute costs. Previously an Intel Fellow and performance engineering leader at Netflix, Gregg is one of the most influential engineers in Linux and cloud infrastructure.
Daniel Stenberg is a Swedish software engineer and the creator of curl and libcurl, tools found on an estimated 20-40 billion devices worldwide - from smartphones and smart TVs to spacecraft and every Windows and macOS installation. A self-taught programmer who began on a Commodore 64 at age 14, he has spent over 25 years maintaining one of the internet's most foundational software projects. He currently works at wolfSSL providing commercial curl support, sits as President of the European Open Source Academy, and contributes actively to internet standards through the IETF. His weekly newsletter chronicles his ongoing work simplifying, securing, and extending curl.
Justin Garrison is a platform engineering veteran who helped launch Disney+ from zero to 50 million subscribers, spent 3.5+ years as a Senior Developer Advocate at AWS working on EKS, and now serves as Head of Product at Sidero Labs. He co-authored 'Cloud Native Infrastructure' with O'Reilly, hosts the Ship It! and Fork Around and Find Out podcasts, and is one of the original chairs of the Kubernetes SIG on-prem. He's known for critical, no-hype takes on cloud native trends and a deep commitment to open source community.
Kris Nóva (1987-2023) was a principal engineer at GitHub, co-founder of The Nivenly Foundation, author, alpinist, and transgender activist who shaped the cloud-native infrastructure world. Best known for creating kubicorn, the Aurae runtime, and co-authoring Cloud Native Infrastructure with O'Reilly, she lived a life of radical generosity - growing Hachyderm from 700 to 40,000 users, founding the Privilege Escalation Foundation to support gender minorities in STEM, and writing Hacking Capitalism to help marginalized technologists navigate an industry that had once left her unhoused. She died on August 16, 2023, in a climbing accident in Seattle.
Muhammad Usman Rao is a Product Manager at DigitalOcean, where he leads cloud-native product initiatives focused on scaling and securing server solutions. With over four years of experience in cloud infrastructure and IT, he transitioned from a hands-on Cloud Engineer role to driving product strategy at one of the world's leading cloud platforms. Based in Pakistan, he holds a BBA from Iqra University and has previously worked at Softnation Technologies, Digitonics Labs, and SBT.