My Story
Twenty years of infrastructure and reliability work, and what happened along the way.
Growing up in France
Born in France and moved a dozen times growing up, following my father's work. A different region every few years, and a lasting opinion about cheese.
Started a Master's, and my first datacenter job
Began a Master's in Computer Science in France, the first leg of a degree that ended up spanning three countries. Alongside it, started at a private cloud company, racking datacenter hardware and automating its administration.
Continued the Master's in China
Spent a year in Tianjin studying Computer Science at Hebei University of Technology. That's where I met my wife!
Finished the Master's in San Francisco
Moved to San Francisco to finish the degree in 2011. Fell in love with the area, and Silicon Valley is a pretty good place to pursue a career in IT.
Founded while42
Started while42, then the world's largest network of French-speaking software engineers, with 3,000 members across 40+ cities, deliberately in-person. The conversations there about the global shortage of engineers led directly to Holberton School.
Senior SRE at LinkedIn
Stayed on through the acquisition as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer. Co-designed a self-healing infrastructure system, granted US Patent US9674031B ("Automated management of a distributed computing system") in 2017.
Co-founded Holberton School
Co-founded Holberton School, a software engineering school that threw out the traditional playbook: no teachers, no lectures, and no tuition until students were hired. They learned by building and teaching each other. We raised $33M and trained thousands of students across 30+ campuses on 5 continents, with graduates hired by Apple, Google, NVIDIA, Tesla and Meta. Acquired in 2022.
PR and DevRel consulting
Worked independently as a PR and developer relations consultant for devtools and infrastructure companies, travelling while I did it.
AI Labs & DevRel at Rootly
Leading AI Labs at Rootly, building AI-driven open-source reliability tools and prototypes, sponsored by Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Google Cloud. The work is on the road as much as at a desk.