Nicola Ballotta is an Italian engineering leader with 25+ years of internet industry experience, currently serving as Director of Cloud at Namecheap where he built EasyWP — one of the world's most affordable managed WordPress hosting platforms — from prototype to production. He is best known as the creator of The Hybrid Hacker, a newsletter that grew from zero to 30,000 subscribers in 18 months before being acquired by Refactoring in June 2024. The combined publication now reaches 120,000+ readers and serves a 900+ member private community of engineering leaders.
Irina Stanescu is an engineering leadership coach, content creator, and former Tech Lead Manager at Google and Uber who turned a severe burnout episode into a mission. She founded The Caring Techie newsletter, now with 61,000+ subscribers, which challenges the tech industry's overwork culture and champions empathy, wellbeing, and influence as learnable leadership skills. Originally from Bucharest, Romania and based in San Francisco, she coaches engineers at companies like Anthropic, Google, and Meta, runs the highly-rated 'Impact through Influence' course on Maven, and speaks at major conferences including Craft Conference and LeadDev Berlin.
Ryan Peterman went from new grad to Staff Engineer at Instagram in three years, then left one of tech's most coveted jobs to build what he wished existed. His newsletter 'The Developing Dev' has 106,000+ subscribers, his podcast 'The Peterman Pod' features career stories from top engineers, and his hardware company Compose is building an ultra-low-profile ergonomic keyboard. Based in San Francisco, he is the rare engineer who codes, writes, interviews Turing Award winners, and designs keyboards with equal intensity.