Hi, I’m Renaud.

My story

I grew up in rural France and got my first real computer, an Amstrad CPC 6128, in 1988. Soon enough, I was writing my own small games in BASIC. After much lobbying, I graduated to the legendary Amiga 500, then a boring but tantalizingly powerful 486 PC, where I coded my first graphics routines in assembly to the sound of Eurodance and tracker music.

It was pre-Internet days: as a computer nerd in the countryside, I found my people online in the underground demoscene BBS forums. I managed to get Internet email access in 1993, armed with a Minitel gateway and an early edition of Internet for Dummies. It felt uncharted, intimidating, and incredibly exciting. I wanted to be part of it!

I learnt that the Internet ran on Unix, so I had to join the cool kids: I first installed Linux in 1996, and it stayed with me throughout my computer science studies. I interned at the local ISP, and my first real payslip came unexpectedly from my university’s IT department, after I volunteered to set up a caching proxy to fix our sluggish Internet connection.

In 2002, I was lucky to intern at INRIA’s Planète lab (where France first connected to the Internet, in 1988) for my Master’s. I considered a PhD, but the dot-com crash had dried up telecoms research funding. After I graduated, I applied to the hottest Internet company in Paris and ended up as a Linux firmware developer on the first Freebox. I then moved to Wanadoo, where I owned the migration of half a million personal websites to Linux.

In the mid-2000s, I started leading a parallel life in the booming Parisian electronic music scene. I became friends with Joachim Garraud and his close circle including David Guetta, helped run his forum and set up his Zemixx podcast, one of France’s first, which hit #1 on iTunes and ran for 20 years. I was lucky to be in the room during the birth of a few hits and could even sometimes be seen interviewing future members of little-known EDM acts.

A new chapter came in 2010, as Facebook came knocking and I moved to London to join its nascent European site reliability engineering team. I’ve stayed in the city ever since, working mainly as a consultant or early employee at startups, building platforms from scratch (one of which was acquired by Twitter) and mentoring engineers.

These days, I have fully embraced agentic AI development. The old dream of a 21st-century future with talking computers is here (and flying cars almost)! With more ideas than time, ADHD since before it was cool, and hopefully enough engineering taste to steer the models, I find these tools a superpower. I take the risks around RSI seriously and my P(doom) is non-zero, but overall I’m optimistic that this industrial revolution will turn out even better for humanity than the last ones.

Projects & Writing

Write-ups coming soon

Work with me

I help teams with infrastructure, platforms and agentic AI. If that sounds interesting, here’s how I work.