Julien Danjou
24 years building open-source software, writing about it, and occasionally convincing other people to do the same.
~/now
CEO of Mergify, helping engineering teams ship faster. Investing in early-stage SaaS startups as a business angel. Running the Toulouse SaaS Club, a non-profit for local SaaS founders. Based in Toulouse, France.
Started blogging
Opened a blog. Apparently couldn't stop. Still at it 23 years later.
Moved to Paris
Moved to Paris. The city where every tech meetup ends at a bar.
Easter-eggs
First real job: sysadmin at Easter-eggs, a cooperative dedicated to open-source projects. Got bored pretty fast, so I started writing C and Python on the side and packaging stuff for Debian. Classic.
awesome window manager
Created awesome, a tiling window manager for X. Named it with zero irony. If you've used Linux, you might have heard of it.
Freedesktop, XCB & X11
Contributed to Freedesktop, XCB and X11. Because apparently building a window manager wasn't enough pain.
GNU Emacs & Lisp
Started contributing to GNU Emacs.
Got deep into Lisp, ended up maintaining a few Common Lisp packages
and wrote a bunch of Emacs extensions published on GNU ELPA —
including oauth2 and rainbow-mode.
Contributed to Org-mode.
eNovance & OpenStack
Joined eNovance, launching the first European OpenStack cloud. Became one of its most prolific contributors. Created Ceilometer, the telemetry platform, and led it as PTL for several years.
Red Hat, Gnocchi & a book
Joined Red Hat. Created Gnocchi, the first ultra-scalable time series database. Self-published The Hacker's Guide to Python. Named in Tariq Krim's list of 100 notable French developers, compiled for the French Tech initiative.
Scaling Python
Published book number two: Scaling Python. Because one book about Python wasn't enough.
Serious Python
Published Serious Python with No Starch Press. 25,000+ copies sold. Turns out people want to write better Python. I wrote about a decade of writing books.
Datadog
Built a Python profiler from scratch at Datadog. Spent a lot of quality time inside CPython internals.
Mergify
Co-founded Mergify. Helping engineering teams merge code, manage CI/CD, and ship faster.
Business Angel
Started investing in early-stage tech SaaS startups.
Moved to Toulouse
Left Paris after many years for the south of France.
Nom d'un Pipeline !
Launched the first French podcast on CI/CD. Someone had to.
Toulouse SaaS Club
Founded the Toulouse SaaS Club, a non-profit bringing local SaaS founders together.
Off the clock
When I'm not shipping code or reviewing pull requests, you'll find me obsessing over Neapolitan pizza dough hydration or slow-smoking brisket on a kamado. I run half-marathons — not fast, but I finish. I'm a top 2% FPS player — was Global Elite in CS:GO and Master in Apex Legends. Competitive gaming is basically debugging under pressure with worse teammates.