Chad Fowler
Chad Fowler is a software entrepreneur, investor and long-time Ruby luminary. He co-organized the original RailsConf series, wrote the best-selling book “The Passionate Programmer,” and helped popularize practices like convention-over-configuration and immutable infrastructure. As CTO at Wunderlist he led a multilingual micro-service rewrite that scaled to millions before Microsoft acquired the company in 2015, where he later directed developer advocacy. Today Chad is a partner at BlueYard Capital, investing in AI-first startups while experimenting with LLM-driven code generation, IoT and generative music. His blend of Ruby history, large-scale architecture and hands-on AI tinkering makes him uniquely qualified to talk about where programming goes next.