Projects from my work and my homelab, with the decisions behind them.
I’m a platform engineer in Montreal. Since 2022 I’ve been running and rebuilding the CI at a company that provides software for transportation, with more than 500 developers depending on my work.
I studied maths and applied physics, first in a preparatory class (ATS), then at ENS Cachan, now ENS Paris-Saclay, and finished with a research master’s in control theory and signal processing. Along the way I did QA on railway systems at Thales Transportation Systems in Vélizy, and spent a year in Tokyo on a research internship.
After I moved to Canada, I joined a fintech whose OCR read receipts inside banks’ mobile apps, as a junior QA automation developer. I built its test frameworks and the device lab they ran on. Within months I was also on its platform team: three of us ran about 180 Linux servers on IBM Cloud and AWS, under contracts that charged penalties from the first minute of an outage.
In 2022 I joined GIRO in Montreal. GIRO makes software for public transit and postal operations, used in some thirty countries. My CI team had a legacy stack and no documentation yet, and it went through team splits and heavy turnover. Until 2025 I was also on call for tier 1 and tier 2 support, on top of the engineering, and I wrote the documentation as I went.
Since then my time has gone to design and engineering, mostly migrations and the tools that keep the CI healthy. I write C# for command-line tools and APIs, TypeScript for extensions and dashboards, PowerShell and C shell for scripts, and Groovy and YAML for pipelines.
At home I run a homelab with its own CI. It ships my sites, this one included.
ongoing
Two small servers at home and one in the cloud, joined by my own private network. They run my git server and CI, which test and ship my websites and side projects, this one included.
2017–2019
I joined a fintech (receipt OCR) as a junior QA automation developer and built its test frameworks and device lab. Within months I moved to the platform team of three, and helped move the product from IBM Cloud to AWS while it stayed live.
2026
Burnie is made of fire, lives on my desktop, hears me, thinks with a local model and answers in his own voice. Speech, model and voice all run on one laptop, and his cut-down twin runs on this page, without a model.