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.

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.

Nicola Ballotta is an Italian engineering leader with 25+ years of internet industry experience, currently serving as Director of Cloud at Namecheap where he built EasyWP — one of the world's most affordable managed WordPress hosting platforms — from prototype to production. He is best known as the creator of The Hybrid Hacker, a newsletter that grew from zero to 30,000 subscribers in 18 months before being acquired by Refactoring in June 2024. The combined publication now reaches 120,000+ readers and serves a 900+ member private community of engineering leaders.

Michael Feathers is a software consultant, author, and Chief Architect at Globant whose 2004 book 'Working Effectively with Legacy Code' redefined how developers think about untested code - coining the now-universal definition that legacy code is simply code without tests. With over 25 years consulting hundreds of organizations, he pioneered dependency-breaking techniques that gave teams a way into codebases they feared. Today he explores how AI reshapes programming, writes the 'mechanisms' newsletter on Substack, and continues speaking at conferences worldwide.