James Thomson is an independent iOS and Mac developer in Glasgow, Scotland, best known for PCalc, the scientific calculator he started in 1992 and has been refining ever since. He runs the two-person studio TLA Systems with his wife, having earlier worked at Apple on the Mac OS X Finder and Dock. A fixture of the Apple developer community, he is also a podcast pundit on Relay FM and The Incomparable, a conference speaker, and a Dungeons & Dragons player who photographs squirrels on the side.
John Gruber is the writer behind Daring Fireball, the long-running Apple-focused weblog he launched in 2002 and turned into a full-time, ad-and-membership-funded one-person media business by 2006. He co-created Markdown with Aaron Swartz in 2004, hosts the popular podcast The Talk Show, and co-hosts Dithering with Ben Thompson. Equal parts UI obsessive and sharp-tongued critic, Gruber has become one of the most influential independent voices covering Apple and Mac culture.
Tommy McGlynn is a Los Angeles-based engineering manager at Meta's Reality Labs, where he leads the AI Character Platform team building AI-powered characters for the mixed-reality metaverse. A self-taught hacker who cracked an ad referral platform at 12, he went on to design scalable server architectures for Apple's TestFlight, speak on stage at WWDC for three consecutive years, and author the Oculus Developer Hub launch. He bridges design thinking and deep engineering - from Flash games and real-time multiplayer systems to VR developer tooling and interactive AI agents.