Pieter Hintjens is a writer, hacker, and public speaker who has spent decades building large software systems and on-line communities. 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 Edge Net 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 technical blog is at hintjens.com.

He's been a strong critic of the patent system, leading the European effort to ban software patents from 2005 to 2007.

His company, iMatix, provides support to the ZeroMQ market, and in this role he's traveled the world, teaching, coaching and helping others to organize successfully.

He defined the term "social architecture" as the process, and the product, of planning, designing, and growing an online community, and has promoted the techniques of social architecture in articles and at conferences.

In his free time he plays a Kawai KL25 piano, badly. He earned his Certified Pistol Instructor badge in Waxahachie, Texas in 2012, though does not own a gun. He learned to drum with Mamady Keita in Brussels in 1998-2000, and plays most weeks with an African dance troupe. He lives in Brussels with his family. He's a member of Mensa and Rotary International and spends most of his time writing and contributing to the ZeroMQ project.