programming-languages
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Chris Lattner Keeps Rebuilding the Layer Everyone Else Takes for Granted
From LLVM and Swift to Mojo and Modular, Chris Lattner has spent a quarter-century removing the seams between an idea and the machine that runs it. His newest chapter puts that long campaign inside Qualcomm.
Todd Schiller
Todd Schiller is the co-founder and CEO of PixieBrix, a low-code platform that lets teams customize, extend, and automate the web apps they already use through browser mods. A programming-languages PhD who studied software verification under Michael Ernst at the University of Washington, he spent years building knowledge-management and analytics tools for hedge funds and consumer companies before starting PixieBrix in 2020. The New York-based company has raised roughly $26M, including a Series A backed by JetBlue Ventures, and has increasingly focused on AI-assisted customer-experience and support workflows.
Lea Verou
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
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
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.