A bit about me

I’ve been a co-founder of Blamey & Stella Information Company since I joined Delano Mandelbaum this fall to be part of the first cohort for Founder Fuel working on Blame Stella. I’ve been a Linux user for over 15 years, and a sysadmin for over 13 years, much of it focused on building, coding, designing and architecting web systems. I love open source software, computers, sound recording, high fidelity music of all sorts.

Originally from the Ottawa area (Aylmer, Quebec actually), I first moved to Montreal for CEGEP to study music and computer science and have stayed ever since. After being a student at McGill I then took on the job as the first official ‘webmaster’ for McGill’s central web systems (yes, my paycheque actually said ‘webmaster’ for a bit). This eventually became a more respectable ‘Web Systems Architect’, and for 6 years, I co-designed the system and lead the development for the custom content management system that ran (and still runs) www.mcgill.ca.

I’ve been a fan, user and advocate of open source software for a long time, and I’m very excited to be working for a company that believes in and thrives on open source. While at McGill, I founded McLUG (McGill’s Linux Users’ Group) and we built everything on open source software (mostly Linux, PHP, Perl, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Apache). After leaving McGill, I worked for Terra Soft Solutions (the makers of Yellow Dog Linux) as a sysadmin and package builder. I had met Kai Staats (CEO of TSS) when I was a customer of theirs, back when we ran www.mcgill.ca on YDL using Apple G4s, and I now consider the former TSS folks (the company was acquired by Fixstars) good friends. I also spent a bit of time hacking on an open source accounting project that I needed for some of my consulting clients. After consulting for a couple of years, I joined StatusNet as a senior systems architect and I was a senior linux administrator for Syntenic (now CloudOps). It was when I was working with StatusNet and Syntenic and being active in Montreal’s great startup community that I got to work with Delano. These are exciting times! With a strong interest still in music and sound recording (I was a Computer Applications student at McGill before I worked there – essentially music and computer science), I have a small record label where I get to record some of my favourite local musicians. I’m a huge fan of all sorts of music, especially jazz and avant-garde.