Pieter Hintjens is a writer, programmer and thinker who has spent decades building large software systems and on-line communities, which he describes as "Living Systems". He is an expert in distributed computing, having written many protocols and distributed software systems. He founded the ZeroMQ free software project in 2007, and in 2013 launched the edgenet project to build a fully secure, anonymous peer-to-peer Internet. He is the author of "ZeroMQ - Messaging for Many Applications" (O'Reilly), "Code Connected", and "Culture and Empire: Digital Revolution". His blog is at hintjens.com.