James Pic
James Pic, also known as “jpic”, “is_null”, started coding in 1995, counts hundreds (thousands?) of Open Source contributions in all sorts of projects especially in Python and Django including to major projects such as Django, Ansible, OpenStack, Arch Linux, ElectionGuard, and even Python itself, maintains more than 50 Open Source packages on Python, Node, and Ansible Galaxy package indexes.
Some of his small Open Source projects have taken off and have got a life of their own now, and that experience has driven him to learn everything about making great documentation to reduce the incoming issues, back when it felt like the whole internet was falling on him with issue reports and questions.
Also, in the spirit of Jez Humble’s Continuous Delivery book, James Pic has been believing that everything can, and should be tested. James Pic started Test Driven Development in 2007, as required to contribute to eZ Components, and it’s been his standard practice since then, which is why he offers excellent expertise on continuous integration, delivery, and even produced his own research on these topics already, such as eXtreme DevOps, an extension of eXtreme Programing.
Childhood
Back when James Pic was a small kid, his uncle and aunt had a computer because they were studying electronics, Cs and robotics, so they would let him play games on their computer, such as Ween, Monkey Island, Transarctica… But after a while, he had played all of them, and was pulling their leg for more. They hadn’t any more, and got fed up by nagging, released the bible of C programming on the table and told him to sit in front of the computer and do what they say, and that’s how they started teaching C to him, he was 9 years old.
James Pic coded and small chat bot and started nagging his parents for a programmable calculator, and had to wait until high school to have one. Finally. The toy of his dreams. He could code games on the go, in BASIC, which book was much more approachable at his young age. He devoured it.
One day he installed one of his games on a friend’s calculator which was of the same model, a TI83+. He didn’t seem to care. One day he came back to him and thanked him for the game… then reported he was blocked by a bug! James Pic told him he had fixed it and could install the new version on his calculator. It was the first time in my life another human being came to James to ask for his code. James Pic still remembers every detail about the scene, how amazing it felt. Of course, he had absolutely no idea this would become his career. At the time he dreamt of working in a Libanese restaurant for the free food!
At 15, James Pic started freelancing on the internet, and got his first check from a customer he closed on a webmaster BBS. It was worth 30 french “francs”, that’s exactly 4.5€. His grandma told him to keep it instead of cashing it. It’s probably somewhere in his stuff. He also closed another customer in a cybercoffee for a website he coded in ActionScript.
Open Source
When Derick Rethans told James Pic to come to Skien because for an award
nomination, James was still a poor PHP and Linux freelancer, father of one at
22, trying to make a living out of his passion like his friends on IRC from
#neoskills. James Pic didn’t want to go back to Windev and Windows
development because the community did not feel the same.
Derick told James he had to come with a suit, but James only had an extremely cheap one, and was not really proud of it, Derick told him to come with it anyway. At that point in time, James only had the money for a single trip to Norway, 10 euros in cash, waiting for payment from an internet customer, a cardboard and a pen and two bottles of french wine for whoever would drive him from Oslo to Skien, and a tent in his backpack.
Once I got there, we met with Derick for the first time in person (everything was happening on IRC back in the days), he was extremely surprised by my young age. He started questioning me about my story, and that’s when I told him that a year before, I had no idea what unit tests, let alone TDD was. It seemed he was falling off his chair!
Derick told me to write a speech in case I would win the award. I didn’t believe about it for a second, the other nominees, also core devs and friends, mentors even, where PhDs, and were nominated for libs I had no clue about, like Sebastien Bergmann for a Workflow component which came with a 70 pages paper that I devoured, and also a reflection component that I didn’t understand anything about at that time, far before I learned anything about metaprogramming, which is of course my goto nowadays as some of you might have noticed lol
Anyway, there was a band on the stage, and the award winners were called one by one … MySQL got an award, big companies, partners, also got awards … and then came the award I was nominated for, the eZ Components award, for my research on making an MVC component, which was so trendy back in 2008. So I went on the stage and said “Thank you eZ Systems for such a modern and human business model!”. The applause was insane. Then I started thanking everyone. After the ceremony, I went out of there with my backpack and headed to the cocktail party with all the people in suits. All much older than me. Many were curious. Some said, “come to my hotel, we can’t let a winner sleep in a tent!”. And that’s how I meet with John Arne Jørgensen, founder of grenlandweb.no. He hosted me at his place until my customer paid me. It took much longer than expected, over a month. He became my best friend, traveled from Norway to my place in Spain with his friends, and I traveled with my wife and kid to Norway for holidays… Rest in peace my friend if you ever read this from the skies!
And there’s also that story where I already had two unpaid internet bills at home, customer in France not paying, not answering my emails nor my calls… And had to choose what to do with my last euros: buy yogurts for my son, or pay one bill to keep my DSL connection going. And that’s how I ended working a months from the streets, wardriving, with this very script I coded to automate the process of hacking wifis: https://github.com/jpic/bashworks/blob/master/wepcrack/functions.sh and by the way that’s how we automated VPS for our customers back when we were running a small hosting business with my IRC friends, on linux patched with vserver and grsecurity way before containers became a thing https://github.com/jpic/bashworks/blob/master/vps/functions.sh
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.