Sarah Chen
Distinguished Engineer · Stripe
Leads the payment-systems group. Wrote the canonical blog post on production-grade rate limiting that every backend engineer references at least once.
Worked together at Previous Co for 18 months. Sarah was my staff engineer and the closest thing I had to a formal mentor.
Marco Riveiro
DevTools Educator · YouTuber · Independent (Terminal Diaries)
Runs the "Terminal Diaries" channel — 240k subscribers. Most accessible explainer of low-level systems I know. Has made Postgres internals feel approachable to thousands of new engineers.
Met at a hackathon in 2019; we've stayed in touch ever since over Postgres tooling and the occasional CLI design rant.
Dr. Anya Volkov
Researcher · Inventor · MIT Media Lab
Holds 11 patents on haptic interfaces. Papers cited over 800 times. Builds things that don't exist yet for a living, and somehow still has time for office hours.
I mentored one of her thesis students through a particularly nasty embedded-systems debugging stretch. We do an annual catch-up every September.
James Park
Founder & CTO · Wavelet (YC W22)
Sold his first company at 23, on his third now. Rare combination of product taste and deep technical chops. Wavelet is doing for ML infra what Stripe did for payments.
On the same on-call rotation 2018–2020. James taught me how to write a postmortem that doesn't hide the lesson.
Priya Rao
Engineering Manager · Datadog
Runs the observability-pipeline team. Promoted four reports into senior engineers in two years — the rare manager who actually grows people.
She hired me for my first real backend job and we've stayed close. If she vouches for someone, take the meeting.
Lina Patel
Director of Product · Linear
Owns the issue-tracking product roadmap. Has the rare gift for cutting through scope creep without bruising the people who proposed it. Ships shockingly fast for someone running a 40-person org.
We were on a panel together at a product conference; ended up in the same hotel bar for three hours afterward. We've been in monthly touch since.
Tomás Fernández
Open Source Maintainer · Independent · solo-maintaining critical infra
Maintains a Rust crate that's in the dependency tree of half the OS-level tools you use. Has the patience to triage 200 issues a quarter and the eye to ship one correct PR per week.
I sent a small PR to his project in 2021 that he merged and improved. We've traded notes on burnout-resistant OSS maintenance ever since.
Dr. Emiko Nakamura
Associate Professor of Computer Science · Carnegie Mellon University
Works on programming-language theory and developer tools. Her group ships actual tools, not just papers — a rare combination. Three of her former students now run engineering at companies you've heard of.
I gave a guest lecture in her grad seminar on production systems. She liked it enough to invite me back twice. We stayed in touch over coffee whenever I'm in Pittsburgh.