27 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
American engineer and Meta executive (Chief Technology Officer) who built Facebook's original News Feed, led the mobile advertising pivot, and now oversees Meta's AR/VR hardware division including Quest headsets.
Software engineer and author of Programming TypeScript — the definitive practical guide to TypeScript — known for clear technical writing that made TypeScript accessible to JavaScript developers at scale.
American entrepreneur and founder of ChatPRD, an AI-powered product requirements document tool for product managers, and host of product management events featuring technology leaders.
AI-powered code review platform that automatically reviews pull requests — providing line-by-line feedback, catching bugs, and suggesting improvements — integrating with GitHub, GitLab, and other version control systems.
Ken Kocienda's 2018 account of his 15 years as a software engineer at Apple — developing the iPhone keyboard and Safari browser — which provides the most specific and credible description of Apple's demo-driven product development process from the inside.
American software engineer and co-founder/CEO of Sentry, the open-source application monitoring platform, who built one of the most widely adopted developer tools through open-source community distribution.
American computer scientist and inventor of CP/M — the dominant microcomputer operating system before DOS — who famously missed or avoided the meeting with IBM that Microsoft attended instead, costing him the PC era.
Argentine-American software engineer and CEO of Vercel, the platform for deploying front-end web applications, and creator of Next.js — the most widely adopted React framework.
Bangladeshi-German-American software engineer and co-founder of YouTube, best known for uploading the first YouTube video ('Me at the zoo') and later as an investor through Youniversity Ventures.
American entrepreneur and co-founder/CEO of Twilio, the cloud communications API company, who applied lessons from his time as an early AWS product manager to build the dominant platform for programmable phone calls, texts, and video.
American software engineer and founder/CEO of Epic Systems, the dominant electronic health records company, who has remained private and personally controlled since founding in 1979.
Finnish-American software engineer who created the Linux kernel (1991) — the operating system that runs most of the world's servers, Android phones, and supercomputers — and Git (2005) — the version control system used by virtually every software developer on Earth.
CEO of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor — the AI-powered code editor that became the fastest-growing developer tool in 2024 by integrating large language models directly into the coding environment.
American software engineer and co-founder and CTO of Airbnb, who built the company's initial technical infrastructure as a Harvard computer science graduate.
Early Amazon employee whose suggestion to use packing tables in Amazon's fulfillment centers — rather than packing orders on the floor — became an iconic story of the practical problem-solving culture of Amazon's earliest operations.
American researcher and engineer who co-authored Accelerate — the definitive empirical study of software delivery performance — and developed the DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, MTTR, change failure rate) that became the standard for measuring engineering team performance.
American computer programmer and co-founder of Microsoft who read about the Altair 8800 in a magazine and convinced Bill Gates to call MITS offering a BASIC interpreter they hadn't yet written — founding Microsoft and the personal computer software industry.
French-American software developer and founder of eBay, who created the world's first large-scale consumer auction marketplace and later became one of Silicon Valley's most prominent philanthropists through the Omidyar Network.
Steve Yegge's 2011 accidentally-public Google+ post that described Jeff Bezos's internal API mandate at Amazon, explaining how the requirement that all teams expose their services as APIs transformed Amazon into a platform capable of launching AWS.
American entrepreneur and co-founder of Netflix, who pioneered DVD-by-mail, then streaming, and codified a radical corporate culture philosophy in the Netflix Culture Deck.
American computer scientist and Google Fellow, Jeff Dean's long-time coding partner, co-inventor of MapReduce, Bigtable, and Google File System — the infrastructure that defined the era of large-scale distributed computing.
American software engineer who wrote much of the original Python code for the Google search engine as a Stanford graduate student — often called 'the third Google founder' — and later founded robotics company Suitable Technologies.
Amazon's first employee, hired in 1994, who built the entire initial technical infrastructure of Amazon.com — the database, the website, the order processing system — enabling the company to launch and scale.
British-American computer scientist, mathematician, and founder of Wolfram Research, creator of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, known for his theory that the universe is fundamentally computational.
American software engineer and blogger who worked at Amazon and Google, best known for his 2011 accidentally-public Google+ rant that described Jeff Bezos's 'API mandate' — becoming the most cited account of Amazon's platform transformation.
R&D executive at Epic Systems responsible for aspects of the platform's technical development and innovation.
Indian-American technology executive who left Microsoft for Google, drove early Android partner relationships, and later led the Google+ social network — which failed despite massive internal resource investment.