Chip Huyen is a Vietnamese-American computer scientist, author, and educator who turned a rejection letter from Stanford into a three-year around-the-world journey, two bestselling Vietnamese travel books, and eventually a second application that got her in. She went on to teach at Stanford, build ML infrastructure at NVIDIA and Netflix, co-found Claypot AI, and write two of the most-read technical books on machine learning systems in production - 'Designing Machine Learning Systems' (2022) and 'AI Engineering' (2025). Her newsletter and blog are required reading for anyone building serious AI products.
Yevgeniy 'Jim' Brikman is the co-founder of Gruntwork and one of the most influential voices in infrastructure-as-code. Author of three O'Reilly books — 'Terraform: Up & Running' (now in its 3rd edition), 'Hello, Startup', and 'Fundamentals of DevOps and Software Delivery' (2025) — he has spent 15+ years building infrastructure that served hundreds of millions of users at LinkedIn, TripAdvisor, Cisco Systems, and Thomson Financial. At Gruntwork, he helped pioneer the idea of treating infrastructure like software: testable, reusable, and versioned.