Top engineering voices to follow in 2025

The internet runs on the shoulders of great engineers, and some of them are generous enough to share what they’re learning along the way.

We launched our list of Top engineering voices to follow in 2025 to spotlight those engineers who aren’t just building behind the scenes, but also writing, posting, and contributing in ways that make the whole community smarter. Whether it’s breaking down complex concepts, sharing honest reflections, or simply asking the kind of questions that spark great conversations, these engineers are helping to make the tech world a little more thoughtful, and a lot more interesting.

Below, in no particular order, are just some of the standout engineering voices you should be following in 2025.

Camille Fournier

CTO | Open Athena

Camille runs the blog Elided Branches, where she shares thoughtful takes on everything from technical leadership to organizational dynamics. Her posts are honest, deeply practical, and grounded in lived experience. She’s all about blending solid engineering practices with empathy and a focus on real-world impact.

She’s also the author of The Manager’s Path, a go-to guide for engineers moving into leadership roles, and she recently co-authored Platform Engineering, a new book that dives into how to build effective internal platforms without losing sight of what people need.

Why follow Camille in 2025? If you care about platform engineering, leadership growth, or just want sharp, honest advice from someone who’s seen it all, Camille is a must-follow this year. She keeps it real, cuts through the hype, and always has something insightful to say.

Connect on LinkedIn | Blog | |

Cassidy Williams

Sr. Director of Developer Advocacy | GitHub

Cassidy runs the blog and weekly newsletter cassidoo.co, where she shares everything from tech deep dives to memes, coding puzzles, and career advice.

Cassidy talks openly about balancing productivity, mental health, and the ups and downs of working in tech — especially as a leader and a mom.

Why follow Cassidy in 2025? Cassidy is the perfect blend of technical know-how, hilarious storytelling, and genuine community focus. She doesn’t just talk about tools like Copilot — she shows you how they can help you write better code and have more fun doing it. Plus, she’s a big believer in “lifting as you climb,” constantly encouraging others to get involved, speak up, and share their work.

Connect on LinkedIn | Blog | | |

Charity Majors

Co-founder & CTO | Honeycomb

Charity runs the blog charity.wtf, full of bold, honest posts and hot takes. If you’ve ever heard someone talk about “testing in production” with a gleam in their eye, there’s a good chance they got it from Charity.

Charity has co-written Database Reliability Engineering and Observability Engineering, both essential reads for anyone serious about building and running reliable systems. Reading her blog is like she’s sitting across from you at a late-night coding session, ranting (in the best way) about what truly matters in engineering.

She’s vocal about the emotional side of engineering too, calling out industry BS and championing healthier, more sustainable work cultures.

Why follow Charity in 2025? Because she tells it like it is. Charity has a unique ability to cut through buzzwords and get to the real problems teams face when running software at scale. She’ll challenge you to think differently about your systems, your team dynamics, and how you grow as an engineer (or leader). She’ll make you laugh, make you think, and probably make you question some of your long-held assumptions in the best way possible.

Connect on LinkedIn | Blog | |

Dr. Claire Knight

VP of Engineering | Odin

Claire is a vocal advocate for thoughtful, inclusive leadership, and passionate about building teams that are not only technically excellent but also supportive and empowering. She openly shares her experiences navigating engineering leadership, mentoring, and growing engineering orgs in a sustainable way.

Why follow Claire in 2025? If you’re into engineering leadership, building strong tech cultures, or want to learn from someone who’s seen it all (and is happy to share). Claire offers a rare blend of deep technical expertise, hard-won leadership wisdom, and genuine care for the developer community. She’s building the future of fintech at Odin while mentoring the next generation of engineering leaders — and she does it all with approachability and heart.

Connect on LinkedIn |

Jaana Dogan

Principal Engineer | Google

Jaana Dogan (also known as @rakyll) is one of those engineers whose work you feel even if you don’t realize it. Her writing and talks are a masterclass in making complex, high-scale systems feel approachable — and she somehow does it all with a grounded, no-nonsense style that makes you want to take notes immediately.

Jaana is vocal about developer platforms and creating better tools for engineers to understand what’s happening in production. She’s a regular speaker at major conferences , and her blog posts dive deep into topics like critical path analysis, production readiness reviews, and performance optimization. Jaana’s X feed is a daily dose of sensible systems engineering—preparing you for production, helping you instrument better, and showing how to build reliable, debuggable distributed software

Why follow Jaana in 2025? If you care about building systems that work under real-world pressure and want to level up your observability game. Jaana cuts through the noise, shares actionable insights from the front lines of Google-scale engineering, and inspires developers to aim for clarity and resilience over hype.

Connect on LinkedIn | | |

Julia Evans

Wizard Zines

Julia Evans is a breath of fresh air in the tech world, and if you’re not following her yet, 2025 is the perfect time to start. Julia is the creator behind Wizard Zines, a series of fun, approachable, and beautifully illustrated mini-books that explain technical concepts in a way that makes you wonder why everything isn’t taught this way. From “How Git Works” to “The Secret Life of Commands,” her zines make deep technical topics feel approachable, empowering, and even joyful.

Alongside her zines, she also shares practical blog posts, quick how-to guides, and small tips that demystify tools like strace, perf, or even basic HTTP internals. Her focus is on the fundamentals — tools and topics like the terminal, debugging, networking, containers, and system calls — things that don’t change every six months and form the backbone of software engineering. You always walk away from her content feeling smarter and more confident.

Why follow Julia in 2025? Julia shows how topics that may be traditionally considered “hard” or “scary” are actually accessible, interesting and fun. Her work isn’t about chasing the latest framework hype — it’s about deeply understanding how things work under the hood. Julia’s magic lies in breaking down complex ideas into small, friendly, comic-style pieces that anyone can understand.

Connect on LinkedIn | Blog | | Wizard Zines

Laura Tacho

CTO | DX

Laura is on a mission to make developer experience measurable, actionable, and genuinely useful — not just a buzzword. She’s a smart and pragmatic voice on LinkedIn, as well as a coach. She runs a live cohort-based course on Maven that helps engineering leaders choose the right metrics, run effective developer surveys, and tie investments (like AI tools or internal platforms) to real impact.

She’s also a regular on the conference circuit, speaking at events like KubeCon, Craft Conf, and IT Revolution’s Leadership Summit, where her workshops are known for being practical and immediately applicable — no endless slide decks, just actionable insights.

Why follow Laura in 2025? If you want to understand how to truly measure and improve your engineering org — without burning out your team or killing moraleLaura brings a rare mix of technical depth and human-centered thinking to developer experience. She cuts through the noise around metrics and focuses on what actually helps engineers do their best work. She’ll help you build a culture that’s not just productive, but healthy and sustainable, too.

Connect on LinkedIn | Website

Lex Neva

Principal Software Engineer, Reliability and Operational Excellence | NVIDIA

By day, Lex is a Principal Software Engineer at NVIDIA, focused on reliability and operational excellence. By night (and probably early mornings), he’s the creator and curator of SREWeekly, a beloved newsletter that surfaces the best writing, case studies, and tools from across the SRE and operations community. It’s like having a friend comb through the entire internet for the most thoughtful and actionable reliability content each week, so you don’t have to.

His writing and talks are filled with stories from the trenches, and he talks openly about the realities of incident management, the importance of empathy, and the challenge of balancing demanding SRE work with hobbies and life outside of tech.

Why follow Lex in 2025? Lex brings a rare combination of deep technical insight and genuine care for the people behind the pager. He helps you stay ahead of the curve on the latest in SRE, while reminding you that reliability is as much about humans as it is about systems. If you want to level up your approach to site reliability, support healthier teams, and learn from someone who’s truly been in the trenches, Lex Neva is an absolute must-follow this year.

Connect on LinkedIn | SREweekly

Lorin Hochstein

Staff Software Engineer | Airbnb

Lorin brings a rare combination of academic rigor (he has a PhD and was once a professor) and real-world experience from running massive, high-stakes systems. He approaches complex systems with depth and humility—focusing not just on what broke, but on how teams think, react, and adapt when things go wrong. He’s also well known for his work on Chaos Engineering and Chaos Monkey during his time at Netflix.

Lorin’s blog is a treasure trove of essays on topics like resilience engineering, incident narratives, near misses, and the cognitive challenges of operating modern software. Each post feels like a mini masterclass on learning from failure. Often, these posts are about incidents and how we can learn from them, deliberately focusing on the complexities and nuances of incidents instead of just "root cause".

Why follow Lorin in 2025? If you care about building systems that don’t just survive but get stronger, and if you want to nurture a team culture that truly learns. Lorin cuts through the usual “root cause” soundbites and shows you what real resilience looks like in practice. He helps teams move from blame to curiosity, and from quick fixes to deeper understanding. His ideas aren’t just theory—they come from navigating real chaos and designing systems that gracefully handle breakdowns.

Connect on LinkedIn | Blog | Website

Nat Welch

Engineering Manager | Laurel.ai

Nat is one of those rare engineering leaders who combines deep technical know-how with a genuine passion for teaching, mentoring, and reflection. He’s a published author with books like Real-World SRE, and a mentor to others.

His blog reads like a personal journal meets engineering playbook—full of reliability lessons, career insights, and honest takes on the highs and lows of building and running systems. There, he shares detailed write-ups on everything from infrastructure migrations to the ethics of data collection, all written with an honesty and practicality that makes them a joy to read.

Why follow Nat in 2025? If you want to learn from someone who’s just as committed to technical excellence as they are to supporting people. Nat blends hands-on SRE experience, big-picture strategic thinking, and a community-first mindset. He cares deeply about security done right, building trustworthy systems, and helping others grow along the way.

Connect on LinkedIn | Blog |

Ned Bellavance

Founder | Ned in the Cloud LLC

Ned is the founder of Ned in the Cloud LLC, breaking down complex cloud topics into clear, practical, and often funny explanations. From in-depth video tutorials to blog posts and podcasts, Ned covers it all with a style that feels like chatting with a super knowledgeable friend.

On his blog, Ned writes about everything from ephemeral values in Terraform to container migration strategies and the messy realities of managing cloud environments. He doesn’t just stick to technical how-tos; he also dives into big-picture cloud topics like security, trust, and the future of hybrid and multi-cloud. Whether he’s demystifying complex tools or calling out hype cycles, Ned’s content is always grounded, honest, and designed to make you better at what you do.

Why follow Ned in 2025? Because Ned is all about helping you understand and enjoy working in the cloud. His mantra — “embrace discomfort, fail often, be kind” — runs through everything he creates, making his content not just informative but genuinely motivating. If you want to level up your cloud skills, stay current with new trends, and receive practical advice you can apply immediately, Ned Bellavance should be on your list this year.

Connect on LinkedIn | | Website | |

Paige Cruz

Principal Developer Advocate | Chronosphere

Paige is on a mission to make monitoring and on-call life less painful and a lot more human. She’s known for helping engineers truly understand observability — not just as a set of tools, but as a way to build healthier systems and healthier teams.

Paige is vocal about how her experience with broken on-call culture and noisy alerts can drain teams. She shares what she’s learned in her blog and podcast, Off-Call, where she chats with real engineers about their incident stories and on-call lessons. Whether she’s breaking down PromQL basics, explaining why 99.99% of traces are noise, or helping teams rethink alert triage, Paige brings clarity, empathy, and just the right amount of tough love.

Why follow Paige in 2025? Paige shows you how to build observability systems that actually work for people, not just dashboards. She helps you focus on what signals really matter, avoid alert fatigue, and create an on-call culture your team can actually live with. Paige always makes space for the messy, real parts of engineering that don’t make it into tool demos.

Connect on LinkedIn | Blog | Podcast

Sam Rose

Senior Software Engineer | Budibase

Sam runs samwho.dev, a blog packed with jaw-droppingly good, interactive essays that break down complex computer science concepts—think Bloom filters, Turing machines, memory allocation, and more. Each post takes anywhere from one to three months to create, and it shows.

These aren’t your average explainers. They’re immersive, hands-on journeys where you don’t just read about ideas—you experience them. With a unique blend of animations, diagrams, code sandboxes, and storytelling, Sam transforms tough topics into intuitive, “aha!” moments. It’s computer science, but cinematic, and in a way that makes learning truly stick.

Why follow Sam in 2025? Because Sam combines deep technical expertise with an artist’s eye for storytelling. He makes complex systems and algorithms approachable, fun, and memorable, while also sharing honest, real-world engineering lessons from the trenches. His designs bring out the beauty behind the code in a uniquely creative way.

Connect on LinkedIn | Blog | |

Simon Willison

Open source developer | Datasette.io

Simon’s blog is the kind you find useful to read on an almost daily basis. His writing—especially around AI—has been described as “level-headed”, mostly posting about LLMs with lots of useful code snippets, and he also creates tooling around this for the community. He writes about coding agents, and is also the creator of Django, a Python web framework, as well as Datasette.

What makes Simon stand out isn’t just the tools he builds, but how openly he shares his process. Simon frequently posts bite-sized ideas, notes, and experiments as they happen. His blog acts like an open lab notebook, documenting his learning process, tool experiments, and reactions to emerging technologies. He runs live demo sessions, writes detailed breakdowns of AI experiments, and even investigates unexpected AI behaviors (like his recent deep dive into how xAI’s Grok model references Elon Musk’s posts).

Why follow him in 2025? Simon embodies the spirit of learning in public and building tools that empower others. He cuts through AI hype with hands-on demos and shares clear, thoughtful insights that help you understand and use new tech. Following Simon feels like getting a front-row seat to the workshop of a truly curious and generous engineer.

Connect on LinkedIn | Blog | |

Shasheen Bandodkar

Security Engineer | Together AI

Shasheen Bandodkaruns HealthyByte, a blog that explores the intersection of software engineering, personal well-being, and sustainable productivity. What sets Shasheen apart is his ability to approach technical topics—like burnout prevention, effective work habits, and mindful development—from both a human and engineering perspective.

His writing often blends personal anecdotes, research-backed insights, and practical frameworks, making HealthyByte feel less like a typical tech blog and more like a manual for being a healthier, more intentional engineer. Shasheen’s unique voice comes through in how he tackles the nuances of developer life: not just how to ship code, but how to do it well and without losing yourself in the process. HealthyByte is a rare space in the engineering blogosphere: grounded, empathetic, and deeply useful for anyone seeking to build great software and a sustainable work-life balance.

Why follow him in 2025? Shasheen bridges the gap between security theory and engineering practice. He writes deeply technical yet accessible content on topics like AI-integrated code scanning, identity governance, and incident workflows—and backs it up with real-world implementation at scale.

Connect on LinkedIn | Blog

Stay Curious, stay connected

Engineering is constantly evolving, and so are the voices shaping it. Whether they’re writing code, breaking down complex systems, or just asking the right questions, the individuals on this list are helping all of us think a little more deeply and build a little more thoughtfully.

We hope you found someone new to follow, learn from, and be inspired by. And if your favorite voice didn’t make it this time? Don’t worry, this won’t be the last edition. Keep sharing, keep nominating, and keep the conversation going.