Amos Wenger, known online as 'fasterthanlime', is a Swiss software engineer, open-source author, and technical educator based in Lyon, France. Through their blog, newsletter, videos, and the Self-Directed Research Podcast (co-hosted with James Munns), Amos has become one of the most beloved voices in the Rust programming community - known for long-form, deeply exploratory articles that make the inner workings of computers approachable and fascinating. Founder of the open-source organization bearcove, Amos builds real tools like fluke (HTTP/2 over io_uring), facet (Rust reflection), and rc-zip while funding this work through sponsorships and content creation.
Jon Gjengset is a principal engineer at Helsing, Rust systems programming educator, and author of 'Rust for Rustaceans' (No Starch Press). He holds a PhD from MIT CSAIL where he built Noria, a streaming dataflow database system offering up to 20x performance improvements. A prolific live-coder and YouTube educator since 2018, Jon co-founded ReadySet (a $29M-funded database startup), contributed to the Rust ecosystem, and teaches at MIT's Missing Semester. Based in Oslo, Norway, he is one of the most respected voices in the Rust community.
Nelson Elhage is a systems engineer turned AI safety researcher who has left fingerprints across the modern software stack. At Anthropic, he co-authored foundational work on mechanistic interpretability and transformer circuits that shaped how the field understands language models. Before that, he was employee ~30 at Stripe and a founding engineer of Sorbet, the Ruby typechecker now used across one of the world's largest payment platforms. His open-source tools - reptyr, livegrep, and ministrace - are staples in the Linux hacker's toolkit. He blogs at 'Made of Bugs' and runs a Buttondown newsletter on computer systems.
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.
Andrew Kelley is the creator of the Zig programming language and president of the Zig Software Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit he founded in 2020. In 2018, he walked away from a senior engineering role at OkCupid to work on Zig full-time on donations alone - a bet that has since attracted $512,000+ in corporate pledges, spawned production-grade projects like Bun and TigerBeetle, and built one of the most passionate communities in systems programming. He writes the 'Zig Zag' newsletter covering Zig and systems programming.