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 she helps teach high schoolers in rural Oregon the basics of computer programming.
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.
Petros Amoiridis
Petros started working as a programmer in 1998. Mostly worked on Oracle databases, and Delphi applications. Then around 2006 he came across Ruby and fell in love with the language.
After 12 years as a full time programmer, he joined GitHub in 2010 as their first support engineer outside of the US. In 2015 he switched to people management and lead remote teams of support engineers and customer support for the years to come. Quit in 2019 to start his own SaaS company. Then joined GitBook in 2020 as their head of support.
After 12 years away from programming, he quit and joined Zed as a developer in 2023.
In his spare time he learns how to build 2D retro style games, and stand up comedy is his secret hobby.