WAi Technologies is a Santa Clara-based digital engineering and AI services company that helps enterprises modernize legacy .NET applications and ship software faster. As a long-standing Microsoft partner, it pairs Azure, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform expertise with its own product line: the open-source Raaghu Design System and AI Pundit, an AI toolchain that converts Figma designs into production-ready front-end code. Its current bet is 'spec-driven' AI delivery - keeping humans in control of strategy while AI does the building.
Mohammad Danish Siddiqui is a senior frontend engineer at Intuit in Milton, Ontario, who has spent more than a decade shipping web and mobile products across Pakistan, the UAE, and Canada. He calls himself a software engineer by career, an aspiring data scientist by education, and a game developer by passion. He built travel platforms at Seera Group, joined Wave HQ after crossing the world from Dubai, open-sourced a NativeScript toast library used by other developers, and writes book notes and career advice for engineers on the side.
Jahanzaib Khan is a software engineer at DigitalOcean (Engineer II) working on AI and cloud products, including the company's agentic cloud direction. A Ruby on Rails and React/Next.js developer based in Lahore, Pakistan, he joined DigitalOcean's orbit through Cloudways, the Lahore-rooted managed-hosting company DigitalOcean acquired. He describes himself as an AI and LLM enthusiast and has spoken about building an agentic cloud at DigitalOcean.
Sam Bhagwat is the founder and CEO of Mastra, an open-source TypeScript framework for building AI agents that pulls in millions of monthly downloads. He earlier co-founded Gatsby, the React-based web framework used by hundreds of thousands of developers and later acquired by Netlify. A Stanford economics grad and longtime open-source builder, he wrote 'Modular: The Web's New Architecture' and 'Principles of Building AI Agents,' the latter dubbed by one YC founder 'the most popular book in San Francisco.' Mastra went through Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch and raised a $22M Series A led by Spark Capital.
Jeff Delaney is the creator of Fireship, a YouTube channel with over 4 million subscribers known for delivering fast-paced, entertaining programming tutorials - most famously the '100 Seconds of Code' series. Based in Phoenix, Arizona, he turned a side project teaching Firebase and Angular into one of the most influential developer education platforms on the internet, complemented by his course platform fireship.io and an 8,000-member developer Slack community.
Hashnode is a blogging platform built for developers, engineers, and tech leaders to write, publish, and grow their technical audience. Founded in 2016 by Sandeep Panda and Syed Fazle Rahman, the platform hosts over 60,000 active blogs and attracts more than 4 million developers monthly. Hashnode offers a free-tier blogging experience with custom domain mapping, AI-assisted writing, and a headless CMS powered by GraphQL APIs - letting teams run enterprise-grade developer blogs and documentation without building infrastructure from scratch. Backed by Salesforce Ventures, Sierra Ventures, and angel investors including Naval Ravikant and Guillermo Rauch, Hashnode has raised $9.37 million and employs roughly 260 people across four continents.
Advith Chelikani is the co-founder and CTO of Pylon, an AI-powered B2B customer support platform based in San Francisco. A Caltech computer science graduate and former Samsara engineer, Advith co-founded Pylon in November 2022 alongside Marty Kausas and Robert Eng. In under three years, the company raised $51.2M in total funding - including a $17M Series A from a16z in 2024 and a $31M Series B in 2025 - scaled to 750+ customers, and grew revenue 5x year-over-year for two consecutive years. Pylon replaces legacy platforms like Zendesk by meeting enterprise support teams where their customers already are: Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord.
Amet Alvirde is a founder and software engineer based in Mexico City, associated with Render - the cloud deployment platform that hit a $1.5 billion valuation after its $100 million Series C extension in February 2026. A long-time Linux advocate, TypeScript developer, and Fullscreen content creator since 2012, he maintains a public digital garden of philosophical writing in Spanish, shoots street photography on a Sony a7iv, and plays guitar. His GitHub projects span fitness data tooling, trading system analysis, and personal infrastructure - a practitioner who builds for himself as readily as for the platform serving 4.5 million developers.
Kamran Maniar is the Chief Executive Officer at Flux (flux.ai), the AI-powered PCB design platform headquartered in San Francisco. Flux - backed by 8VC and Bain Capital Ventures - has raised $39 million in total funding and serves over one million hardware builders across the globe, making professional circuit board design as accessible as writing a prompt. Operating at the intersection of AI, electronics, and manufacturing, Maniar leads from the crossroads of Silicon Valley ambition and Pakistan's deep engineering talent.
Max Wang is the Co-Founder and CTO of Workstream, a San Francisco-based HR and payroll platform built specifically for America's hourly workforce. He co-founded China's AngelList equivalent (VC.CN) in 2011, built it to a 50-person team, then crossed the Pacific to co-build Workstream with Desmond Lim and Lei Xu after a 100-interview discovery sprint revealed that hiring hourly workers was a massive unsolved problem. Today, Workstream serves 4,000+ businesses across 24,000 locations, has raised $118 million, and is deploying AI tools - including VoiceAI - to compress hiring cycles from weeks to hours for restaurants, franchises, and deskless-workforce employers.
Sandeep Panda is the Co-Founder and CTO of Hashnode, a developer-first blogging and community platform that lets software engineers own their content and publish on custom domains. Founded in 2016 alongside Syed Fazle Rahman, Hashnode has grown to serve 3M+ monthly readers and 10M+ monthly views, backed by Sequoia Capital India's Surge, Salesforce Ventures, and angel investors including Naval Ravikant and Guillermo Rauch (Vercel). A graduate of IIIT Bhubaneswar with a background in web development and technical writing, Sandeep has authored books on AngularJS and HTML5, and is now building Bug0, an AI-native end-to-end testing platform.
Rakesh Vartak is the CEO of WAI Technologies, a Santa Clara-based AI-powered software and Microsoft solutions company with 250+ employees and offices in the US and India. With over 30 years in IT and ITES, he leads a company building next-generation developer platforms - including AI Pundit (spec-driven AI development) and Raaghu (open-source React design system) - that promise to deliver digital transformation 3x faster for enterprises across healthcare, finance, and logistics.
David Winer is the Co-Founder and CTO of Ciro (YC S22), an AI-powered go-to-market platform that automates sales prospecting from target identification to booked meetings. With roots in applied mathematics, a Berkeley EECS master's, and a Stanford MBA, he spent time at Bain, Pure Storage, and Google (where he served as PM for the Kotlin programming language and sat on the Kotlin Foundation board) before co-founding Ciro in 2022 with Brown University friends Richard Lee and Ross Geiger. Ciro raised $3.8M in seed funding from CRV, Y Combinator, and SV Angel, and runs on a stack anchored by Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, and Elasticsearch. Outside the office, David self-identifies as an 'exceedingly obscure internet personality' and writes a personal blog mixing statistical deep-dives with essays on bike theft and vegetarianism.
Sam Corcos is a four-time founder and the co-founder and former CEO of Levels Health, a $300M metabolic health company that pairs continuous glucose monitors with a software layer to help people understand how food affects their blood sugar. He co-founded CarDash (Y Combinator S17, acquired 2020), Sightline Maps, and LearnPhoenix before building Levels into a category-defining health company with $67M raised from a16z and a community of 1,400+ member-investors. In 2025, he joined the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and was appointed U.S. Treasury Chief Information Officer. He is also known for extreme minimalism (one pair of pants, one backpack), tracking time in 15-minute increments, and hosting 100+ intellectual salon dinners in New York and San Francisco.
Shawn 'Swyx' Wang is a Singaporean-American developer, writer, and community builder who left a $350K hedge fund career to teach himself to code at 30 - then coined the term 'AI Engineer,' built one of tech's most influential AI podcasts (Latent Space), and launched the AI Engineer conference series that put 15,000 developers in rooms together to figure out what this job actually is.
Simon Hoiberg is a Danish serial entrepreneur, software engineer, and content creator based in Zurich, Switzerland. He left a $300K/year freelancing career to bootstrap a portfolio of SaaS products - including FeedHive (AI social media scheduling), Aidbase (AI customer support), LinkDrip (link attribution), TinyKiwi, and SignupGate - achieving $1M+ combined ARR. He grew his Twitter/X following to 200K+ organically and teaches React Native development through Galaxies.dev, reaching 100,000+ developers. Known for radical transparency about both wins and failures, Simon openly documents his entire entrepreneurial journey.
Marcy Sutton Todd is a senior frontend infrastructure engineer at Khan Academy and one of the most recognized voices in web accessibility. A former Deque Systems engineer who helped shape axe-core, she pivoted from photojournalism to web development, built the Testing Accessibility workshop series, and has spent over a decade making the web usable for everyone - framing it as a civil rights issue, not a compliance checkbox.
Scott Vinkle is a Toronto-based Accessibility Specialist at Shopify with over 12 years of experience making digital products usable for everyone. Holding the IAAP CPWA certification - one of the highest credentials in web accessibility - he co-leads Shopify's accessibility guild, contributes to W3C ARIA standards, speaks at international conferences, and publishes practical accessibility guidance through his newsletter, blog, and Medium. He's the rare specialist who bridges the gap between compliance checkbox and genuine inclusive design.
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.
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.
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.
Josh W Comeau is a Montreal-based frontend developer, indie course creator, and one of the most beloved CSS and React educators on the internet. After stints at Unsplash, Shopify, Khan Academy, and Gatsby, he left corporate engineering in 2020 to build interactive, deeply original courses that generated over $550,000 in presale revenue. His CSS for JavaScript Developers and The Joy of React courses have taught more than 28,000 developers through a teaching style that blends interactive widgets, mini-games, and the rare gift of building genuine mental models rather than just showing code.
Kent C. Dodds is a world-renowned web development educator, open source engineer, and entrepreneur based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Creator of React Testing Library and the Testing Library ecosystem, he left a staff engineering role at PayPal in 2019 to build a self-employed education empire spanning EpicReact.dev, EpicWeb.dev, TestingJavaScript.com, and now EpicAI.pro. Recognized as a Google Developer Expert, Microsoft MVP, and GitHub Star, he has taught tens of thousands of developers through hands-on workshops, books, courses, and his long-running newsletter. Father of six and an adrenaline enthusiast who snowboards and rides a onewheel, Kent believes that kindness and teaching compound faster than any technology trend.
Lee Robinson is a developer educator and engineering leader who spent five years at Vercel scaling Next.js to over a million monthly active developers, rising from individual contributor to VP of Developer Experience. He now serves as Head of AI Education at Cursor, teaching developers how to build software with AI-powered tools. Known for creating free courses like Mastering Next.js and React 2025, his newsletter 'Optimism (for the web)' and 234K+ Twitter following reflect his belief that great technology should be easy to understand and interesting to learn.
Mark Erikson is the primary maintainer of Redux and creator of Redux Toolkit - the tools that power state management in millions of React applications worldwide. Known online as @acemarke, he became the de facto keeper of Redux in 2016 when Dan Abramov handed off the project. Since then, he has rebuilt Redux's documentation from the ground up, designed the hooks API in React-Redux, and created Redux Toolkit to eliminate the boilerplate that once made Redux notorious. He is a Senior Front-End Engineer at Replay.io and a tireless community fixture - answering questions on Discord, Reddit, Bluesky, and anywhere else developers congregate online.
Rauno Freiberg is an Estonian Staff Design Engineer at Vercel who blurs the line between design and engineering with surgical precision. Known for his obsession with invisible details - the micro-interactions, animations, and tactile feedback that make software feel alive - he built cmdk (downloaded millions of times weekly), wrote the seminal 'Invisible Details of Interaction Design' essay, and created Devouring Details, an interactive design education platform. He previously shaped the Arc browser at The Browser Company. His philosophy: code is the material, and mastery of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is the only honest path to great interfaces.
Shawn 'swyx' Wang is a Singapore-born AI engineer, founder, and community builder who pivoted from a $350k/year quantitative finance career to become one of the most influential voices in AI engineering and developer tools. He coined the term 'AI Engineer', co-founded the AI Engineer Summit (now the world's largest technical AI conference for engineers), co-hosts the Latent Space podcast reaching 10M+ readers/listeners, and is the author of the seminal 'Learn in Public' essay that has shaped how millions of developers think about career growth. He is the founder of Smol.ai and a prolific creator with 626+ published essays, talks, and tutorials.
Swizec Teller is a Slovenian-American software engineer, bestselling author, and educator based in San Francisco who has spent 20+ years turning hard-won startup experience into actionable career wisdom. Best known for his Senior Mindset newsletter and books like 'Scaling Fast' and 'Senior Engineer Mindset,' he teaches engineers how to stop writing code and start building leverage. Currently building web UX for gene sequencing at Plasmidsaurus, he's the rare person who codes all day and then writes about coding all evening - and makes that seem entirely reasonable.
Tanner Linsley is a Salt Lake City-based software engineer, open source creator, and founder of TanStack - the ecosystem behind React Query, TanStack Router, TanStack Table, TanStack Form, and TanStack Start. Co-founder of Nozzle.io, an enterprise SEO platform, Tanner built a multi-million-download open source empire by solving real problems he faced every day, pioneering headless, framework-agnostic, fully type-safe libraries now used by Fortune 500 companies including Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Walmart, and Target.