James Pic
James Pic, also known as “jpic”, “is_null”, and “1337shadow”, started coding in 1995, counts hundreds of Open Source contributions including to major projects such as Python, Django and Ansible, also credited in some Arch Linux packages, and maintains more than 50 Open Source packages on both the Python and the Node package indexes.
James Pic started programming in C at the age of 9 in 1995, he started his own business and did small jobs on the internet before starting to work in a multinational company in 2002.
In 2004, James Pic decided to become an independant consultant, determined to spend his time with Open Source technology that he considers superior in every way, especially in conviviality and on Linux.
In 2007, James Pic became core-dev on the libraries of the company eZ Systems under the direction of genius Derick Rethans and thus learned from other geniuses such as Sebastian Bergmann, and to his surprise won his first award in Skien in Norway in 2008.
At this time, James Pic was co-administrator of the NeoSkills group under the direction of William Waisse, managing self hosted Gentoo servers with GrSecurity and all kind of security patches to offer the best possible security to NeoSkills and own customers.
At the same time, James Pic passed online degrees at the University of Illinois in partnership with O’Reilly in parallel - which allowed him to learn how the industry worked 10 years earlier.
Circa 2010, James Pic began to introduce SCRUM in French companies while following a developer path, while working “in the shadows” to ensure great success.
In 2012 James Pic started a new plugin for the Django framework, which today benefits from more than one million downloads per year, which attests to the confidence that the industry have in his code, now used by FANGs, banks, insurance, governments around the world.
This was the start of the free software brand YourLabs which offers a catalog of many free software for making software.
In 20 years, James has worked for large accounts such as Bull, Alcatel or the CNRS, in the cloud for Numergy which has earned him to contribute to OpenStack, as well as for small startups or SMEs that he is passionate about, but also on a voluntary basis for groups such as Quadrature du Net on the Memopol project which is famous for being the critical software to block the ACTA EU law project.
James Pic still contributes to major Open Source projects such as Python, Django, and Ansible, as well as a huge range of minor projects.
James Pic also gives his time to help others like others helped in back before he became officialy a 1337 h4x0|2, which earned him to be in the all-time top 0.88% all-time on StackOverflow with the ranking #5572 out of 12 million registered developers with a reputation close to 30K.
James Pic leads the development of government or private teams and projects, including fintech and blockchain, and of course of YourLabs R&D to keep challenging the status quo.
Computer engineering is his work and his afterwork, which has earned him to give various conferences over time, on subjects such as DevOps but also others which are not necessarily technical such as the history of Lean.
Also, James Pic is the father of 2 charming children and he is passionate about board sports such as sailing and skiing or snowboarding, bicycle, tennis, chess, hardware hacking, and music as a multi-instrumentalist and singer and transformist.
James claims that you will not find anyone who loves bugs more than he does, which he proves by spending a crazy amount of time fixing other people problem for free on StackOverflow (where he is top 0.1% all-time) and on IRC or mailing lists, often anonymously. He claims for excuse that just like you would spend part of your time solving chess problems if you want to be Grand Master one day, and that helping others with their problems is an important part of his training. This makes James an amazing go-to “flying doctor” to have on call.