Vincent Pradeilles is a French iOS engineer and Swift educator based in Lyon, France. By day he is a Founding Solutions Engineer at Photoroom, the AI-powered photo editing app. By night (and weekends) he runs swiftwithvincent.com — a blog, newsletter, and YouTube channel that distills complex Swift patterns into bite-sized, practical tips. With 26,000+ Twitter followers, ~1,000-starred open source repos, and talks at FrenchKit, dotSwift, try! Swift Tokyo, NSSpain, and iOS Conf SG, he is one of the most recognized French voices in the global Swift community.
Kenneth Schlenker is a French-American serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Opal, the #1 screen time and focus app on iOS. He first envisioned a focus app in 2008 while working at Google - it took him 11 years to actually build it. After founding art-tech company ArtList (acquired by artnet), launching Bird's Paris operations, and building a $10M ARR business with just 11 people, he also runs Open Scout, a weekly newsletter covering early-stage startups read by investors at Sequoia, YC, a16z, and Accel.
Kent Beck is the creator of Extreme Programming (XP) and a pioneer of Test-Driven Development, pair programming, and the Agile Manifesto. A programmer with 52+ years of experience, he co-created JUnit with Erich Gamma, co-invented CRC cards and design patterns in software with Ward Cunningham, and spent seven years coaching at Facebook. Today he runs the 'Software Design: Tidy First?' Substack newsletter (123,500+ subscribers in 195 countries), hosts the Still Burning podcast, and explores augmented human-AI coding. In April 2026 he publicly announced a Parkinson's disease diagnosis, continuing his mission to help technologists feel safe in the world.
Luca Rossi is an Italian software engineer, entrepreneur, and writer based in Rome who turned a side project into one of the world's most-read engineering leadership newsletters. After co-founding and scaling travel startup Wanderio to 25M+ customers over eight years, he launched Refactoring in 2020 - a newsletter covering engineering management, software teams, and tech leadership. It now reaches 172,000+ subscribers, ranks in the top 10 Substack business newsletters, and generates approximately $300K/year in revenue, all operated solo. He also hosts the Refactoring Podcast, featuring guests like DHH, Kent Beck, and Camille Fournier, and in 2025 released Tolaria, a free open-source macOS knowledge base app built entirely with AI coding tools.
Mehdi Ouazza is a Brussels-based Data Engineer and Developer Advocate at MotherDuck with 10+ years in the data space. He is the first DevRel hire at MotherDuck, a DuckDB-powered cloud analytics startup, where he grew social media by 450% and built a YouTube channel to 900K+ views. Creator of the 'Mehdio's Tech (Data) Corner' newsletter on Substack, founder of DataCreators.Club, and a prolific speaker and open-source contributor, Mehdi is known for demystifying data engineering and AI careers with humor, playfulness, and radical honesty.
Nathan Lambert is a Senior Research Scientist and Post-Training Lead at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), where he leads open-source language model development on the OLMo and Tulu series. A UC Berkeley PhD, he previously led the RLHF team at Hugging Face, co-building the TRL library and the Zephyr model. He runs Interconnects AI, a Substack newsletter read by tens of thousands covering post-training, open models, and AI policy, and is the author of The RLHF Book (Manning Publications). With roughly 8,000 academic citations and a reputation for demystifying the hardest parts of modern AI, Lambert is one of the most trusted voices at the intersection of open-source AI research and public education.
Paweł Huryn is a Warsaw-based product management expert, creator of The Product Compass - a Substack newsletter with 133,000+ subscribers ranked #1 in product management worldwide by Favikon. A former software developer turned CPO turned full-time educator, he brings 15+ years of hands-on product experience to weekly deep-dives on AI product management, strategy, and discovery. His philosophy: build it first, test it, then teach it.
Sebastian Raschka is a German-born AI/ML researcher, educator, and author who has built one of the most trusted independent voices in the machine learning community. Through his Substack newsletter 'Ahead of AI' (184,000+ subscribers), bestselling books like 'Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch)', and 91,000+ starred GitHub repositories, he demystifies cutting-edge AI for practitioners worldwide. After a stint as an Assistant Professor at UW-Madison and a role as Staff Research Engineer at Lightning AI, he now runs RAIR Lab as an independent researcher, writer, and consultant.
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.
Swyx (Shawn Wang) and Alessio Fanelli are the co-hosts of Latent Space, the #1 AI Engineering podcast and newsletter with 200,000+ subscribers and 10M+ total readers. Swyx — a former Singapore hedge fund trader turned developer advocate who coined the term 'AI Engineer' — and Alessio — a Forbes 30 Under 30 VC partner and Rome-born dropout-turned-engineer — together define the curriculum and culture of a generation of engineers building with AI.
Tristan Handy is the co-founder of dbt Labs (formerly Fishtown Analytics), the company behind dbt (data build tool) - the open-source transformation layer that helped define the modern data stack and spawned the analytics engineering profession. Starting with $10,000 of his own money in 2016, he bootstrapped for four years before raising $410M and reaching a $4.2B valuation. Following a 2025 merger with Fivetran, he now serves as Co-Founder and President of the combined entity on a path to IPO. He also writes the Analytics Engineering Roundup newsletter, which has 30,000+ subscribers.
Jon Stokes is a 25-year veteran of online media who co-founded Ars Technica in 1998 with Ken Fisher, helping build it into the internet's premier tech publication before selling it to Condé Nast for $25 million. An engineer turned journalist turned product builder, he holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering from LSU alongside two master's degrees from Harvard Divinity School in early Christian history - a combination that explains his unusual range: equally comfortable dissecting CPU microarchitecture, AI policy, Second Amendment law, and New Testament scholarship. Today he's co-founder and CPO of Symbolic AI, runs a Substack newsletter on AI and crypto with 13,000+ subscribers, and serves as a fellow at Open Source Defense.
Julian Shapiro is a Canadian-born entrepreneur, deeptech seed investor, and prolific writer who built a career that spans open-source animation engines, growth marketing agencies, and a Y Combinator-backed startup. He founded Demand Curve, the largest growth marketing education platform for startups, and now runs Julian.capital, a deeptech seed fund writing $500K-$2M checks into robotics, chips, energy, medtech, and biotech. His free handbooks at julian.com - covering writing, startups, fitness, and audio - are read by over a million people annually. He co-hosts the Brains Podcast with Courtland Allen and was previously VP of Marketing at Webflow.
Tom Yeh is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder and the creator of AI by Hand, a wildly popular educational newsletter and community that teaches transformers, LLMs, and deep learning architectures through pen-and-paper calculations. With 62,000+ Substack subscribers, 200,000+ social media followers, and a Feynman-inspired philosophy that you only truly understand what you can build by hand, Yeh has become one of the most influential voices in practical AI education - bridging the gap between black-box hype and genuine first-principles understanding.
Adam Jacob is the co-founder of Chef (the infrastructure automation company acquired for $220M) and current CEO of System Initiative, a next-generation DevOps platform using digital twins to visually model and simulate infrastructure. A self-taught systems engineer who ran ISPs as a teenager and built automated infrastructure for 15 startups before co-founding Opscode/Chef in 2008, Jacob created the Chef, InSpec, and Habitat open-source tools that helped define the DevOps movement. Today he advocates for rebuilding DevOps from the ground up, arguing that tooling and culture must evolve together - and that Infrastructure as Code, as practiced, is still broken.
Adam Wathan is a Canadian developer, entrepreneur, and the creator of Tailwind CSS - the utility-first CSS framework used by millions of developers worldwide. As CEO of Tailwind Labs, he turned a side-project experiment into a multi-million dollar business encompassing Tailwind UI, Headless UI, and an ecosystem of developer tools. A college dropout turned prolific course creator, he built his reputation first through 'Refactoring to Collections' and 'Refactoring UI' (co-authored with Steve Schoger), generating over $2.5 million in book sales alone. In January 2026, he made headlines again when AI's disruption of developer documentation led to dramatic revenue declines and significant layoffs at Tailwind Labs, prompting major sponsorships from Vercel, Google, and others rallying to support what they called 'foundational web infrastructure.'
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.
Amos Wenger, known online as 'fasterthanlime', is a Swiss software engineer, open-source author, and technical educator based in Lyon, France. Through their blog, newsletter, videos, and the Self-Directed Research Podcast (co-hosted with James Munns), Amos has become one of the most beloved voices in the Rust programming community - known for long-form, deeply exploratory articles that make the inner workings of computers approachable and fascinating. Founder of the open-source organization bearcove, Amos builds real tools like fluke (HTTP/2 over io_uring), facet (Rust reflection), and rc-zip while funding this work through sponsorships and content creation.
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.
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.
Charlie Guo is a Stanford and YC alum who turned a personal obsession with AI into a 23,000-subscriber newsletter and a Developer Experience role at OpenAI. Through Artificial Ignorance at ignorance.ai, he writes at the intersection of software engineering and artificial intelligence - cutting through hype to deliver practical, hands-on insights for builders. He has co-founded multiple startups (ClassOwl, FanHero, Crowdmade), published a book of startup interviews called Unscalable, and created a widely-used Python library for Gmail with 1.8k GitHub stars - all while teaching himself AI engineering through relentless experimentation.
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.
Christoph Molnar is a Munich-based statistician-turned-ML-author who turned a side project into the field's most-cited book on interpretable machine learning. Author of six books including the canonical 'Interpretable Machine Learning' (3rd ed., 2025), he runs the Mindful Modeler newsletter and consults on making black-box models explainable. With 16,000+ Google Scholar citations and a PhD from LMU Munich, he sits at the precise intersection where statistical rigor meets machine learning pragmatism.
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.
Dave Rupert is a senior UX engineer at Microsoft, co-founder of the Austin-based web agency Paravel, and co-host of the long-running ShopTalk Show podcast. With over two decades in web development, he is widely recognized for his accessibility advocacy - notably founding The A11Y Project in 2014 - and for open-source tools like FitVids.js and FitText.js. He brings a maker's instinct, a teacher's heart, and a quietly sharp wit to everything he touches.
Delba de Oliveira is a Staff Developer Advocate and DX Engineer at Vercel who built Next.js Docs and the Next.js Learn platform, teaching millions of developers about React and Next.js. She transitioned from medicine and customer service into engineering, famously entering tech when a colleague asked her to 'open a GitHub issue.' Known for her visually rich educational content, conference keynotes at Next.js Conf, and her hobby as a videographer, she combines technical depth with storytelling instinct - bridging complex concepts and accessible learning in the React ecosystem.
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.
Elvis Saravia is the co-founder and lead AI researcher at DAIR.AI, a mission-driven organization democratizing AI research and education worldwide. Based in Belize, he is the author of the Prompt Engineering Guide - one of the most widely read AI resources on the internet with 73,000+ GitHub stars and over 3 million learners - and publishes the AI Agents Weekly newsletter. A PhD graduate from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, he has contributed to landmark AI projects including the Galactica large language model at Meta AI, and is known for bridging rigorous research with accessible, production-minded education for the next generation of AI builders.
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.
Hamel Husain is a machine learning engineer with 25+ years of experience who built part of the foundation beneath GitHub Copilot - his CodeSearchNet project was early LLM research later used by OpenAI for code understanding. Today he runs Parlance Labs, consults with AI teams across 35+ products, co-authored O'Reilly's 'Evals for AI Engineers', and teaches thousands of engineers how to move beyond vibes and actually measure their AI systems.