The Team

Nathan Sobo

Nathan joined GitHub in late 2011 to build the Atom text editor, and he led the Atom team until 2018.

He also co-led development of Teletype for Atom, pioneering one of the first production uses of conflict-free replicated data types for collaborative text editing.

He's been dreaming about building the world's best text editor since he graduated from college, and is excited to finally have the knowledge, tools, and resources to achieve this vision.

Antonio Scandurra

Antonio joined the Atom team in 2014 while still in university after his outstanding open source contributions caught the attention of the team.

He later joined Nathan in architecting Teletype for Atom and researching the foundations of what has turned into Zed.

For the last two years, he's become an expert in distributed systems and conflict-free replicated data types through the development of a real-time, distributed, conflict-free database implemented in Rust for Ditto.

Max Brunsfeld

Max joined the Atom team in 2013 after working at Pivotal Labs.

While driving Atom towards its 1.0 launch during the day, Max spent nights and weekends building Tree-sitter, a blazing-fast and expressive incremental parsing framework that currently powers all code analysis at GitHub.

Before leaving to start Zed, Max helped GitHub's semantic analysis team integrate Tree-sitter to support syntax highlighting and code navigation on github.com.

Nate Butler

Nate joined the Facebook team in 2015 as a product designer on News Feed, after spending the previous few years working on sites like Format.com and Lookbook.com.

He spent three years shipping products to the Facebook app, and working on creative & developer tools. Before leaving to join Zed, Nate spent his last year at Facebook focused on long-range product vision.

Nate spends his after hours hacking time thinking about design & software education, and working on tools to help students prepare for the industry.

Mikayla Maki

Mikayla started working in software as a freelance programmer, building WordPress websites for small businesses from 2015 to 2017.

In 2018 she decided to return to school, going to Portland State University and study P2P software, CRDTs, and distributed web technologies with Rust.

As an intern at Zed for the summer of 2022, she built the integrated Terminal Emulator, and was subsequently hired.

In her spare time, Mikayla dreams about what the distributed web could look like, goes on long walks through San Francisco, and bakes little treats for her friends and family.

Julia Risley

Julia gained a deep passion for software development while working on game projects before turning her attention to dev-tools. Obsessing over details drove her to programming language design and the creation of several custom languages.

Dissatisfied with the state of code focused text editors she created Superb Text, a personal editor project with the goal of improving efficiency and navigation flow.

In her spare time Julia enjoys contributing to various open source projects, reading, and spending time with her cats.

Joseph Lyons

Joseph became interested in building software during the years of beta testing he did for various audio plugin developers. The process of testing and reviewing software sparked a desire to understand the engineering aspect; subsequently, he studied computer science at Indiana University.

He worked as a backend developer, using Python to build system processes, developer tools, and to automate tasks, from 2019 to 2022.

After hours, Joseph enjoys playing with new tech, jamming on the drums, and watching movies with his family.

Kirill Bulatov

Kirill started programming professionally in 2010 and has managed to participate in many interesting projects. Since then, he's changed his life cardinally a couple of times and even moved to another country to live in.

In 2019, Kirill found his passion in developer tools, Rust, and rust-analyzer development; it was only a matter of time before he'd discover and appreciate Zed. In 2023, he joined the team to appreciate it more productively.

Apart from making Zed better, he likes to spend time with his family, play tennis, and cycle around the local suburbs and islands.

Piotr Osiewicz

Piotr began his programming journey in 2017, diligently refining his skills as a software engineer at ESET and Cisco. He enthusiastically advocates for the use of profiling tools and firmly believes in the power of compiler optimizations, even providing a gentle push or two to achieve better results.

In 2023, Piotr joined Zed with a strong desire to actively contribute to making performance the central pillar of its success.

In spare time, Piotr enjoys contributing to open source projects, playing Dota and going for lenghty walks.

Marshall Bowers

Marshall started his career in 2013 building software for educators at Gravic. From there he joined WorkOS in 2020 to make it easy for developers to add enterprise features to their apps.

In pursuit of his passion for building tools for developers, Marshall joined the Zed team in 2023 to help build the editor that he wants to use every day.

Marshall is a strong type system aficionado who enjoys using languages like Rust, Haskell, and Idris, and is designing his own programming language in his spare time.

When he's not coding for work or pleasure, Marshall likes to play video and board games with his wife and friends.

Conrad Irwin

Conrad has been working on open source developer tooling since 2008.

He is best known for his work on pry, an early interactive debugger for Ruby, and his role as CTO at Superhuman, the fastest email client in the world.

He joined Zed in 2023 to build the future of collaboration for software engineers, a role that perfectly combines his interests in high quality user experiences and distributed datastructures.

Thorsten Ball

Thorsten got his start as a software developer working for German mobility startups, flinc and ioki, shipping software up and down the stack.

Then he joined Sourcegraph in 2019, where he helped build the first version of Batch Changes, the internal developer tool sg, became a staff engineer, and later engineering manager before going back to an engineering role.

You might know Thorsten for his two self-published books: Writing An Interpreter In Go and Writing A Compiler In Go. He also writes a weekly newsletter called Register Spill.

He joined Zed in 2024 to build a text editor that can replace Vim for him and to continue his journey of learning as much as possible about how the great teams build great software.