Andrej Karpathy
Former Director of AI at Tesla, founding member of OpenAI, created Stanford’s CS231n deep learning course. Coined “vibe coding.” Recently released autoresearch โ a 630-line Python tool that lets AI agents autonomously run ML experiments. One overnight run completed 126 experiments and dropped the “Time to GPT-2” benchmark by 11%. Currently says programming is “unrecognizable” now that agents work.
Evan You
Andrej Karpathy
Former Director of AI at Tesla, founding member of OpenAI, created Stanford’s CS231n deep learning course. Coined “vibe coding.” Recently released autoresearch โ a 630-line Python tool that lets AI agents autonomously run ML experiments. One overnight run completed 126 experiments and dropped the “Time to GPT-2” benchmark by 11%. Currently says programming is “unrecognizable” now that agents work.
Evan You
Creator of Vue.js and Vite. Founder and CEO of Void Zero โ the company now consolidating Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, and Oxc into a unified JS toolchain. Art history degree, went through Google Creative Lab, then independent open source since 2016. Vue has 250k+ GitHub stars and 2M+ users.
Eleanor Berger
๐ @intellectronica ยท intellectronica.net ยท Substack
AI engineering leader โ has led AI teams at Microsoft and Google. Writes clearly about LLM fundamentals and agentic coding practices. Ported Anthropic’s “Building Effective Agents” examples to Pydantic AI. Focused on agent skills as the primary extension mechanism for AI coding tools. Her Substack “Eleanor on Everything” covers elite AI-assisted coding.
Evan Boyle
Engineer at Microsoft/GitHub working on agentic coding. Previously at Pulumi, Amazon Ads, and Azure. Ships infrastructure at scale โ notably an online migration of 500M rows from MySQL to DynamoDB using Pulumi.
Guillermo Rauch
CEO and founder of Vercel, creator of Next.js, Socket.io, and Mongoose. Started coding at 10 in Argentina, dropped out of high school, moved to SF as a teenager. Founded Cloudup (acquired by Automattic), then built Vercel. Record growth month in February 2026, driven by AI coding agents generating deployable software.
Gergely Orosz
๐ @GergelyOrosz ยท pragmaticengineer.com
Writes The Pragmatic Engineer โ the #1 tech newsletter on Substack with 1M+ readers. Previously engineering manager at Uber, software engineer at Skype/Microsoft. Covers Big Tech and startups from the inside with actionable advice for engineers and engineering managers. Left big tech in 2021 to write full-time.
David Fowler
Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft on the .NET team. Created SignalR, NuGet, and co-created ASP.NET Core and .NET Aspire . Built the git server for Azure deployments (Kudu) and architected the Azure SignalR Service. Born and raised in Barbados, joined Microsoft in 2008 out of Florida Tech.
Martin Fowler
martinfowler.com ยท ๐ @martinfowler
Chief Scientist at Thoughtworks since 2000. Co-authored the Agile Manifesto. His 1999 book Refactoring popularized the practice. Writes extensively on software architecture patterns, evolutionary design, and development processes at martinfowler.com โ one of the most cited resources in software engineering. Nine books total. His main interest is understanding how to design software systems to maximize the value development teams can deliver.
Chris Richardson
microservices.io ยท chrisrichardson.net
Creator of microservices.io and author of Microservices Patterns (44 patterns for distributed systems). Java Champion, founder of the original CloudFoundry.com. Currently building Eventuate, a platform for transactional microservices. His pattern language covering Saga, API Composition, CQRS, and service decomposition is the go-to reference for teams adopting microservice architecture.
Jarred Sumner
๐ @jarredsumner ยท jarredsumner.com
Creator of Bun โ the all-in-one JavaScript runtime, bundler, test runner, and package manager built on JavaScriptCore. Previously frontend engineer at Stripe. Bun joined Anthropic in December 2025, and Jarred now works on both Bun and Claude Code. Built Bun in Zig as a from-scratch alternative to Node.js.
Mitchell Hashimoto
๐ @mitchellh ยท mitchellh.com
Co-founded HashiCorp, took it to IPO, and exited in 2023. Was part of the initial engineering team behind Vagrant, Packer, Consul, Terraform, Vault, and Nomad. Now building Ghostty โ a fast, cross-platform terminal emulator written in Zig with platform-native UI and GPU acceleration. Has been working on Ghostty since 2021 as a personal project. Lives in LA.
shadcn
Shadab Ahmed. Design engineer at Vercel, creator of shadcn/ui โ the component library that shifted React UI from package installs to code ownership. Built on Radix and Tailwind CSS. The “copy the code into your project” model became the default for new React projects. Based in London.
Simon Willison
๐ @simonw ยท simonwillison.net ยท GitHub
Co-creator of Django. Created Datasette (open-source tool for exploring and publishing data) and the LLM CLI tool for working with language models from the terminal. Board member of the Python Software Foundation. Previously engineering director at Eventbrite (via acquisition of Lanyrd, his Y Combinator startup). One of the best-known engineers experimenting with LLMs in the open โ has been blogging about it for 3+ years. Works full-time on open-source tools for data journalism.
Grady Booch
Co-creator of UML, IBM Fellow, ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow. Was Chief Scientist at Rational Software from 1981 through its IBM acquisition. Now at IBM Research working on the Handbook of Software Architecture. One of the foundational voices in software architecture and object-oriented design. Still active and opinionated on X about AI, software craft, and the state of the industry.
Uncle Bob Martin
Robert C. Martin. Introduced the SOLID principles, co-authored the Agile Manifesto, wrote Clean Code and Clean Architecture. Has been in the industry since the 1970s. Runs Uncle Bob Consulting and produces training videos through Clean Coders. Currently programs primarily in Clojure. Advocate for software craftsmanship and TDD.