Technologists

Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

Theoretical computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, known for work on quantum computing and computational complexity. Writes the blog Shtetl-Optimized, where he has kept both his old forecasts and his later verdicts on them in public.

Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.

Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab. Co-author of "Database Reliability Engineering" and "Observability Engineering". Writes at charity.wtf about on-call, hierarchy, hiring and the engineer/manager pendulum.

Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.

Cognitive scientist and designer; author of The Design of Everyday Things; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group; former vice president at Apple; founding director of the Design Lab at UC San Diego.

Author and clean-energy investor who has been publishing dated forecasts of solar, wind, battery and electric-vehicle costs since 2011, and publishing the corrections when they came in low.

Cryptographer who created the Signal Protocol and founded Signal, the encrypted messenger whose protocol now protects messages in WhatsApp and Google Messages as well. He stepped down as Signal’s CEO in 2022 and writes occasionally at moxie.org.

Robotics researcher, emeritus professor at MIT and former director of its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, co-founder of iRobot and Rethink Robotics, now at Robust.AI. Since January 2018 he has published dated predictions about self-driving cars, robotics and human spaceflight and scored them in public every New Year's Day, a commitment he made through 2050.

Co-founder of Ethereum. Publishes long essays on mechanism design, governance and what cryptography is for, and returns to his earlier positions to say which parts he no longer holds.

Writer of Daring Fireball, which he has published since 2002, and the most closely read independent commentator on Apple. Co-creator of Markdown. His reading of an Apple keynote is treated as a signal by the industry, which is what made his 2025 retraction of his own WWDC 2024 coverage a story in itself.

Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.

Co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA since 1993.

Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".

Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; previously president of Y Combinator.

Co-founder and CEO of Shopify; long-time Linux user and Omarchy contributor.

Founded SpaceX in 2002, joined Tesla's board in 2004 and became its chief executive in 2008, and later founded Neuralink, The Boring Company and xAI. Bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X. Posts as @elonmusk, which is where almost everything he says publicly now appears.

Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.

American entrepreneur (1955 to 2011); co-founded Apple in 1976 and led it again from 1997 to 2011; ran Pixar from 1986 to 2006.

Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and co-founder and CEO of World Labs.

Game and engine programmer, creator of Handmade Hero and of the Computer Enhance course on performance-aware programming, and a long-standing critic of object-oriented design orthodoxy. He worked on the user interface of Jonathan Blow's The Witness, which is the codebase his writing on compression-oriented programming draws its examples from.

Michael Paulson, known online as ThePrimeagen, a programmer who spent ten years at Netflix and now streams and teaches programming full time on Twitch and YouTube.

American programmer and hacker, founder of the self-driving company Comma.ai and of the tiny corp, which builds the tinygrad neural network framework.

American game designer and director, for nineteen years at Blizzard as a World of Warcraft quest designer and then game director of Overwatch; now runs the independent studio Kintsugiyama.

Self-taught software engineer, formerly a distinguished engineer at Google Cloud and one of the most visible voices in the Kubernetes community; retired from full-time work in 2023 and now advises and invests.

Danish software engineer and Microsoft technical fellow, creator of Turbo Pascal and Delphi and lead architect of C# and TypeScript.

Computer science researcher at Cambridge, author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, after a decade in industry at his own startups and LinkedIn.

Chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft, which he has led since 2014.

Professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, and a co-founder of the robotic foundation model company Physical Intelligence.

Research scientist at Meta working on multilingual models and evaluation; led the multilingual team at Cohere and was at Google DeepMind before that.

Co-founder of Netscape and of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. Wrote the Techno-Optimist Manifesto and “Why AI Will Save The World”.

Chief scientist at Thoughtworks and author of Refactoring, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture and Refactoring: Ruby Edition. His bliki at martinfowler.com has been the reference text on refactoring, testing and architecture for two decades.

Programmer, photographer and musician, best known for the Python Requests HTTP library and other Python tooling.

Programmer; wrote Redis and hping, and blogs about C, systems programming and working alone.

AI researcher and host of the Lex Fridman Podcast.

Technologist and entrepreneur; former CTO of Threadless and chief technology officer of the 2012 Obama re-election campaign.

Game designer and theorist. Lead designer of Ultima Online and creative director of Star Wars Galaxies, author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design, and founder of Playable Worlds. Has written about game design, virtual worlds and online communities at raphkoster.com since 1998.

Computer performance engineer working on datacenter performance at OpenAI, previously Netflix and Sun/Joyent. Author of Systems Performance and BPF Performance Tools, and creator of flame graphs.

Computer science professor at Georgetown and author of Deep Work, Digital Minimalism and Slow Productivity. He has written the blog Study Hacks since 2007 and contributes to The New Yorker.

Founder of OpenStreetMap, the collaborative map of the world; later worked on mapping at Microsoft and Telenav.

Founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, creator of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, and author of A New Kind of Science.

Programmer and writer; co-wrote The Rust Programming Language and worked on Rust's documentation for years.

CEO of Google and Alphabet.

Usability consultant and author of Don’t Make Me Think and Rocket Surgery Made Easy.

Chief Scientist at OpenAI. Worked on the research that turned scaled reinforcement learning into reasoning models, and writes about where he thinks that path leads.

Creator of Ghostty and co-founder of Superlogical, started in 2026 to build server-side terminal infrastructure. Co-founded HashiCorp and created Vagrant and Terraform before that.

Computer science professor who works on fast data processing; co-author of the simdjson parser and a weekly blogger about software performance since 2004.

Creator of the Zig programming language; president and lead developer of the Zig Software Foundation.

Software engineer who writes about low-level and systems programming at nullprogram.com; author of the Elfeed feed reader, the Endlessh SSH tarpit and Enchive.

Free software developer, founder of SourceHut, and creator of the sway window manager, the aerc mail client and the Hare programming language. He has worked full time on free and open source software since around 2018, first on donations and then through his company, and writes at drewdevault.com.

Co-founder of WordPress, which runs a large share of the web, and chief executive of Automattic. Writes at ma.tt. In September 2024 he began a public campaign against WP Engine, the private-equity-owned WordPress host, over trademarks and what he says is its failure to contribute back to the project.

Software engineer, researcher and writer, a longtime Wikipedia editor, creator of Web3 is Going Just Great and author of the newsletter Citation Needed, which she publishes on her own self-hosted site.

Programmer and designer who writes at tonsky.me; author of Fira Code, DataScript and AnyBar.

Cryptographer and professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he works on applied cryptography and user privacy. He writes A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering, which is where most public arguments about messaging encryption, client-side scanning and cloud backup end up being adjudicated.

Statistician and software engineer who writes R packages for reproducible research and publishing, including knitr, bookdown and blogdown.

Web infrastructure engineer and standards editor; chaired the IETF HTTP working group and co-authored core HTTP and Atom specifications.

Founder of the Free Software Movement and the GNU Project, original author of GNU Emacs and the GNU General Public License, and long-time president of the Free Software Foundation.

Software engineer and writer; worked on Mapbox and built Placemark and Simple Statistics, and blogs at macwright.com.

Programmer and entrepreneur; co-founded GitHub and created Jekyll, Gravatar and the Semantic Versioning spec.

Security technologist and author, lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School and a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He has written about the economics and politics of security at schneier.com since 2004, and coined much of the vocabulary the encryption debate is argued in.

Investor and engineer; CEO of GitHub from 2018 to 2021, co-founder of Ximian and Xamarin, and funder of the Vesuvius Challenge to read the Herculaneum Papyri.

Game designer, creator of RimWorld and founder of Ludeon Studios, and author of Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences. Worked on BioShock Infinite before going independent. Writes occasionally about design method at tynansylvester.com.

American entrepreneur and venture capitalist; co-founder and CEO of Loudcloud/Opsware, co-founder of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) in 2009, and author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things (2014).

Co-founder of Microsoft and of the Gates Foundation. Writes Gates Notes on global health, energy and climate, and on whatever they have been reading.

FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.

Programmer and writer known for detailed source code reviews of classic game engines, and author of the Game Engine Black Book series on Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM.

Co-creator of the Go programming language, of UTF-8 and of the Plan 9 operating system; formerly of Bell Labs.

Programmer, teacher and speaker; long-time Microsoft developer-community figure, host of the Hanselminutes podcast and author of the hanselman.com blog.

English mathematician and writer (1815 to 1852), chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed analytical engine; she translated Luigi Menabrea's paper on it and added seven explanatory notes.

Interface designer and researcher; formerly a human-interface inventor at Apple; founder of Dynamicland.

Security researcher who founded Report URI and has crawled the top million websites since 2016, measuring how the web actually adopts HTTPS, HSTS, CSP and the rest of the browser security toolkit. He writes the results up at scotthelme.co.uk.

Swedish open source developer; creator and lead maintainer of curl and libcurl, and a co-founder of the Rockbox project.

President of the VideoLAN non-profit and one of the lead developers of the VLC media player; active on the project since 2005.

Author of Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby and 99 Bottles of OOP, and a teacher of object-oriented design. Her 2014 RailsConf assertion that duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction became one of the most-quoted lines in the craft.

Developer, author and YouTuber covering Raspberry Pi, homelab hardware and Ansible automation.

Technical educator, conference speaker and developer relations engineer based in Ottawa, Canada. Author of the Anubis bot filter and of over 400 articles at xeiaso.net.

Programmer and writer; co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse, and author of the Coding Horror blog.

Software engineer in Chicago; writes the cassidoo.co blog and a weekly developer newsletter.

Irish independent game developer, maker of VVVVVV, Super Hexagon and Dicey Dungeons.