Random Thoughts by Fabien Penso

Me

I'm Fabien Penso. I'm a tech and product focus person, a photographer, and I love traveling. I enjoy being busy, started working professionally in tech in 1998, and never stopped since. Worked for years as a consultant, cofounded a few companies and love being involved in new projects. The most popular I created is probably LinuxFr.

These days when coding, I usually use Rust, Swift and Ruby.

You can contact me via email. I can also be found on Mastodon, GitHub, Instagram, Twitter, Flickr and you can check my Linkedin profile.

This website is available on IPFS at penso.eth [Gateways: cloudflare, penso.eth.link].

You can also view old archived posts.

2023

› Released Constellations, a high-performance and real-time Stargaze blockchain indexer using Rust. Initially a side-project, it quickly evolved into a critical component and is now an integral part of displaying content on the main website.

› Talk at Nebular about Constellations and how I built the indexer. [view the slides]

2020 - 2022

› Principal engineer at Beam, a macOS browser including AI and note taking. Among other things, I created a secure E2EE backend API that stores and synchronizes user-generated content across all devices using AES-GCM encryption. The API was written in Ruby and later rewritten in Rust, with client-side libraries in Swift, JS, and WebAssembly.

› Seed investor at Stargaze, a decentralized community-owned NFT app chain on the cosmos ecosystem.

2018 - 2020

› Co-founder, CTO and CPO at Kard, a French bank for teenagers.

2017 - 2018

› CTO and CPO at AccorLocal, Accor SA. A project to provide hotel services through a mobile app.

2015 - 2017

› CTO at Stuart, a company providing last mile delivery in multiple countries. Revamped and managed the tech until it was acquired by La Poste.

› CTO at Cloudscreener, a company doing performance reviews of cloud services (AWS, Google Cloud, etc).

2012 - 2014

› Senior Engineer at Process One. Built the infrastructure used to send push notifications for all the BBC mobile apps.

› Released Faast, an iOS app for receiving push.

› Released Heritage, a community for analog photography.

› Released Liker, an iOS facebook app.

2009 - 2011

› Senior Engineer at Causes (San Francisco), the biggest Facebook application at the time (over 200 million users).

› Released Push4, an iOS app for receiving push.

2007 - 2009

› Founded CONOVAE SARL, a company providing software engineering.

2004 - 2005

› Master degree of computer science. Jumped 4 years and applied with only a high-school diploma. Grade: Diploma with honors.

1999 - 2003

› Co written Templeet, an Open Source template system used by LinuxFr and hundreds of other projects.

› Co founded DBee SA, a company to stream events on video.

1998

› Founded LinuxFr, the biggest French community about Linux and free softwares. About 50 million requests a month.