JetBrains is a privately held software company that builds professional developer tools used by millions of programmers worldwide. Founded in 2000 in Prague, it is best known for the IntelliJ IDEA family of integrated development environments - including PyCharm, WebStorm, Rider, GoLand and CLion - and for creating the Kotlin programming language, now Google's preferred language for Android. The company also builds team tools such as TeamCity, YouTrack and the ReSharper extension for Visual Studio, and has moved aggressively into AI with its Junie coding agent and AI Assistant. JetBrains has never taken outside funding and remains self-funded and profitable.

Lea Verou is a Greek-American web standards leader, MIT researcher, and creator tools advocate whose fingerprints are on the web itself. She has designed web technologies now baked into every major browser, built 30+ open-source projects with nearly 2 billion npm downloads (including PrismJS and Color.js), authored the bestselling CSS Secrets (O'Reilly, 2015), and served as an elected W3C Technical Architecture Group member. A PhD candidate at MIT CSAIL in Human-Computer Interaction and Programming Language Design, she consults for Google, Mozilla, and Stripe, leads the State of HTML survey, and has delivered 100+ conference talks worldwide - always live-coding.

Russ Cox is a Distinguished Engineer at Google and the longtime technical lead of the Go programming language, the open-source language he helped shape for over a decade. Known for foundational work on RE2 (a safe, linear-time regex engine), Plan 9 from User Space, and Go's module system, he bridges deep computer science theory with production-grade engineering. After stepping down as Go tech lead in September 2024, he shifted focus to AI-powered open source tooling - building Gaby and Oscar, agent systems designed to help maintainers with the unglamorous but essential work of keeping software alive.

Thorsten Ball is a German software engineer, author, and technical educator best known for his self-published books 'Writing an Interpreter in Go' and 'Writing a Compiler in Go', which have become go-to resources for developers wanting to understand programming language internals. With over two decades of professional software development experience, he currently works at Sourcegraph on Amp, an AI-powered coding agent. He also writes the weekly newsletter 'Register Spill', covering systems programming, developer tools, and the intersection of AI with software engineering.