Louie Bacaj is an Albanian-American software engineer turned entrepreneur who climbed from immigrant poverty in the Bronx to Senior Director of Engineering at Walmart, then walked away from it all in 2021 to build a portfolio of small bets. He co-founded the Small Bets learning community with Daniel Vassallo, runs the M&Ms Newsletter on Substack with 9,000+ subscribers, and teaches engineers how to level up their careers and build income outside the 9-to-5. His philosophy: make money with bits, diversify into atoms.
Daniel Stenberg is a Swedish software engineer and the creator of curl and libcurl, tools found on an estimated 20-40 billion devices worldwide - from smartphones and smart TVs to spacecraft and every Windows and macOS installation. A self-taught programmer who began on a Commodore 64 at age 14, he has spent over 25 years maintaining one of the internet's most foundational software projects. He currently works at wolfSSL providing commercial curl support, sits as President of the European Open Source Academy, and contributes actively to internet standards through the IETF. His weekly newsletter chronicles his ongoing work simplifying, securing, and extending curl.
Joe Beda is the co-creator of Kubernetes and Google Compute Engine, a software engineer who helped build the infrastructure layer that now underpins the modern cloud. After a decade at Google where he made the first Kubernetes commit on GitHub, he co-founded Heptio to commercialize Kubernetes adoption, which VMware acquired in 2018 for roughly $550 million. Now semi-retired, he advises companies like Tailscale, invests in startups including Bluesky and Edera, and writes about technology at eightypercent.net - a blog named after his belief that a simpler system solving 80% of the problem beats an overengineered one that never ships.
Michael Lynch is a bootstrapped solo founder who quit Google after seven years to build software and hardware businesses entirely on his own terms. He grew TinyPilot - a KVM-over-IP device built from a $100 Raspberry Pi kit - into a $1M/year business and sold it in 2024 for ~$600K. He writes with radical transparency about money, failure, and the craft of independent software development at mtlynch.io, and is now writing 'Refactoring English', a book on writing for software engineers.
Predrag Gruevski is an independent software engineer, open-source creator, and Rust ecosystem luminary best known for building Trustfall - a universal query engine that lets you query anything from APIs to LLMs - and cargo-semver-checks, a semantic versioning linter that's becoming a cornerstone of the Rust publish workflow. A former MIT competitive mathematician turned principal engineer at Kensho Technologies, Predrag brings Olympic-level rigor to API design and compiler technology, writing and speaking extensively on correctness-first software development.
Ryan Peterman went from new grad to Staff Engineer at Instagram in three years, then left one of tech's most coveted jobs to build what he wished existed. His newsletter 'The Developing Dev' has 106,000+ subscribers, his podcast 'The Peterman Pod' features career stories from top engineers, and his hardware company Compose is building an ultra-low-profile ergonomic keyboard. Based in San Francisco, he is the rare engineer who codes, writes, interviews Turing Award winners, and designs keyboards with equal intensity.
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.
Sylvain Kerkour is a French software engineer, security researcher, and author best known for 'Black Hat Rust' - a hands-on book applying offensive security techniques with the Rust programming language. Self-described as a 'professional troublemaker', he writes about programming, hacking, and entrepreneurship at kerkour.com under the tagline '(Ab)using technology for fun & profit'. He is a vocal advocate for supply chain security in the Rust ecosystem and creator of the Bloom open-technology platform and the ChaCha20-BLAKE3 AEAD cipher implementation.