Cindy Sridharan is a distributed systems engineer, O'Reilly author, and influential technical writer based in San Francisco. Known online as @copyconstruct, she wrote the seminal O'Reilly book 'Distributed Systems Observability' and runs the Systems Distributed newsletter on Substack. She is widely respected for her long-form thinking on observability, testing in production, microservices architecture, and engineering culture. She spent years as an engineer at imgix, led the Prometheus user group in San Francisco, and has spoken at major industry conferences including QCon and GOTO. Her Medium essays on monitoring, testing, and systems thinking have shaped how a generation of engineers thinks about building resilient software.
Maarten Grootendorst is a psychologist-turned-ML engineer at Google DeepMind, best known for creating BERTopic, KeyBERT, and PolyFuzz - open-source NLP tools with over 15 million combined downloads. Co-author of the Amazon #1 bestseller 'Hands-On Large Language Models' (O'Reilly, 2024) with Jay Alammar, he runs the 'Exploring Language Models' newsletter with 2M+ views and has taught 50,000+ students on DeepLearning.AI. His work bridges the worlds of psychology and AI, making complex language model internals accessible through strikingly visual guides.
Sam Newman is an independent consultant, author, and speaker who has spent over 25 years helping organisations navigate the messy realities of distributed systems. Best known for 'Building Microservices' - one of the most widely read technical books of its era - he runs Sam Newman and Associates from London, advising engineering teams worldwide on cloud architecture, microservices, and software resilience. A former ThoughtWorks principal, he is also the host of the Magpie Talk Show podcast and a sought-after conference speaker at events like QCon, NDC, and GOTO.