My Story

From France to San Francisco and beyond — the places, projects, and people that shaped my journey in tech.

Early days

Growing up in France

Born and raised in France. Developed an early passion for technology and computers that would shape the rest of my career.

2008-2009

Studied Computer Science in China

Lived in Tianjin, China for a year, studying Computer Science at Hebei University of Technology. An immersive experience in a completely different culture and academic environment.

2009-2011

Management & Marketing of IT at Dominican University

Moved to California to earn a Certificate in Management and Marketing of Information Technology at Dominican University of California in San Rafael.

2012-2015

Senior SRE at LinkedIn

Joined LinkedIn as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer in San Francisco. Co-designed a self-healing infrastructure system that was granted US Patent US9674031B ("Automated management of a distributed computing system") in 2017. Learned what it takes to keep services running at massive scale.

2016-2022

Co-founded Holberton School

Co-founded Holberton School, a venture-backed software engineering school that threw out the traditional playbook — no teachers, no lectures, no upfront tuition. Students learned through project-based, peer-to-peer learning, tackling increasingly challenging real-world projects and teaching each other along the way. The income share agreement model meant students paid nothing upfront and only contributed a percentage of their salary after landing a job, removing financial barriers to world-class tech education. Trained thousands of students across 30+ campuses on 5 continents, with graduates hired by Apple, Google, NVIDIA, LinkedIn, Tesla, Meta, Dropbox, Docker, and Pinterest. Backed by $33M from Trinity Ventures, daphni, Omidyar Network, Redpoint Eventures, Reach Capital, and Pearson — with individual investors and advisors including LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Docker founder Solomon Hykes, and supporters like NE-YO and Priyanka Chopra. Featured in The New York Times, Fortune, Financial Times, CNN, CNBC, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and Bloomberg. Acquired by African Leadership Group in 2022.

2013-present

Founded while42

Founded while42, the largest network of French-speaking tech engineers in the world. What started with 12 people in a San Francisco restaurant grew into 3,000+ members across 50 chapters on 6 continents. Deliberately in-person — no Facebook group, no Slack — just real face-to-face meetups every month in each city. Members gathered for talks, networking (including while42's signature 'Double Pipe' speed-networking format), and community. New chapters were started organically by members who moved to new cities and wanted to recreate the community locally. The recurring conversations about the global shortage of good software engineers at while42 meetups directly led to the creation of Holberton School.

2020-2021

Co-authored DevOps Course on edX

Co-authored "DevOps: Foundations and Tools," an online course published on edX in partnership with Universidades Anáhuac, teaching DevOps principles and tooling to a global audience.

2024-present

AI Labs & DevRel at Rootly

Leading Developer Relations and AI Labs at Rootly. Building AI-driven open-source reliability tools and prototypes, sponsored by Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Google Cloud. Writing, speaking, and helping SREs succeed with AI.

Ongoing

Writing & Speaking

Publishing in TechCrunch, VentureBeat, The New Stack, and LeadDev. Speaking at SREcon, PlatformCon, DevOpsDays, and conferences worldwide. Hosting the Humans of Reliability podcast.

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