21 developers transforming Silicon Valley: these are the people shaking up the tech industry and redefining what it means to be a programmer

Erin Bond; Bryan Liles; Srilatha Ranganathan; Michael Bergin; Samantha Lee/Insider

Software developers are critically important to the modern world.

Whether they're working on projects with huge impact, thinking outside-the-box on how to solve problems, or getting creative with how they build their careers, there's a reason that they're some of the most sought-after employees today.

To highlight some of these amazing makers, Insider sought out nominations from coding foundations, nonprofits, and dev-focused firms, while also leaning on our own knowledge of the developer community.

The goal was to track down influential people doing impactful work and shaping the tech industry. 

We then asked nominees to expand on what's captured in their LinkedIn's by sharing projects they're most proud of or advice to developers who are early in their careers.

The result is a varied list of 21 developers, some of whom have spent decades in the software field and others who only recently learned to code. The list highlights people with traditionally revered skillsets as well as those forging new paths that haven't yet gained widespread recognition. 

Erin Bond took an unorthodox path to the software engineering field. A former elementary school teacher, Bond learned to code five years ago through a one-year course at the Ada Developers Academy.

Now, as an engineer at Code.org, Bond is passing developer know-how along, designing curriculum and writing code for the computer science education nonprofit. After initially joining the nonprofit as an intern, Bond has gone from revamping the header of the company's website to helping build an AI and machine learning module for its students.

"The process of learning and synthesizing so much complex, new-to-me information was daunting, but ultimately really interesting and rewarding," Bond told Insider.

As principal solutions engineer at the communications software firm Twilio, Ankur Kumar helped lead the company's partnerships with public health agencies to build Covid-19 tracking tools.

He worked with one state to build an SMS system for sending exposure notifications and helped hospitals across the Pacific Northwest set up systems to text, call, and email people about vaccine appointments. He also build a tool in his home state of West Virginia that made it easy for volunteers to sign up to help connect people with supplies and health information during the early months of the pandemic.

"In a few weeks, we had over 75 volunteers," Kumar said, adding that the volunteers helped assist over 100,000 people. "I'm so proud of the thousands of hours everyone put in."

Kumar's latest project is an app that helps roommates and families coordinate buying groceries and cooking in order to reduce food waste. 

"It really doesn't matter what you're building as long as you're passionate about it," he said.

Emmanuel Bernard has spent more than 15 years building open source projects that help other developers.

As chief architect at the enterprise software firm Red Hat, Bernard oversees its database tools including Hibernate, which he helped found before Red Hat acquired JBoss, the firm that owned it at the time. He also created Quarkus, a Kubernetes framework. 

Bernard is also a Java champion, an honor bestowed to developers who have made major contributions to the language. He also hosts two podcasts, in French and English, about open source projects.

Lauren Lee McCarthy is best known for her work in creating p5.js, an open source JavaScript library for creative coding that's accessible and inclusive for artists, designers, educators, and beginners.

She graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with degrees in both computer science and design and also received a fine arts Masters degree from the University of California, Los Angeles where she now teaches as an an associate professor in design media arts.

Her advice to other developers is to not get wrapped up in systems and rules, 

"Design tools for the world you want to live in," Lee McCarthy said. "Consider the communities you are impacting with your work, and the communities you can build around more inclusive visions of a technological future."

Michael Bergin is the cofounder and director of architecture at Higharc, a web platform for designing 3D digital models of houses so that builders or homebuyers can explore them before they're physically constructed.

It's not his first project that aims to automate home design: Before founding Higharc, Bergin was in charge of a team of researchers focused on the architecture and construction industries at the software firm Autodesk. He's also taught courses in architectural design at the University of California, Berkeley.

Bergin's work aims to make the homebuilding process easier by training AI to better understand building design, and his research has focused on deep learning algorithms meant for architectural software.

"The majority of homes that are built receive no individual design attention from a professional," Bergin told Insider. "Software provides us with a way to improve the quality of each of these homes built by writing in code the procedures that are used by expert designers and engineers."

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