Hugo “Shaka” Hervieux

XY Problem solver. he/him.

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whoami

My name is Hugo, and I’m a 29-year-old SWE [1].

I’m into food (both restaurants and cooking), sport (my current obsessions are indoor cycling and calisthenics), and am an amateur photographer. I speak French (native), English (bilingual), and Spanish (broken).

I started working with computers and networks by volunteering for an associative ISP during my studies. Today, I make a living trying to understand how computers work [2].

Depending on the company, my role can be called DevOps, SRE, SWE, Ops, or Online Developer.

I have solid Kubernetes, Linux, and security experience and can troubleshoot complex issues across the stack. When designing systems, I emphasize simplicity and intelligibility. I also focus on end-user success and thrive in support roles.

Some parts of this website are in french, like the pages about Montréal.

• Contact Me
• Resume
  • Summary
  • Experience
  • Education
  • Skills
• Où travailler à Montréal (FR)
• Où manger à Montréal (FR)
• Talks
  • PancakesCon 2 - Containers are built on a castle of lies
  • Choix d’outillage Kubernetes (in french)
  • Matters Meetup - Observabilité minimale & logging GKE, stackdriver (in french)
  • Meetup VTP - Docker 101 (in french)

[1]

I am not a professional engineer. The term is protected in Québec and Canada. Using it requires one to be a member of the Ordre des Ingénieurs du Québec . However, I’m working for a US company (where the term is not protected, so they tend to call me engineer) whose Canadian entity is based in BC (the term is not protected the same way there; they are usually okay as long as the word “professional” is not mentioned). To make things even more complex, I have a French engineering diploma delivered by the Commission des Titres d’Ingénieurs and worked as an engineer in France, so the term might appear in my resume on French positions. Because of all this mess, I’m using the acronym “SWE” to avoid legal trouble in Québec.

PS: If you are from the Order, please don’t sue me. I am not trying to impersonate an engineer, and I don’t have one of those rings made of broken bridges that must be cast in a Mordor volcano.

[2]

Modern computers and networks are composed of an incredibly high stack of abstraction layers. Each layer brings its own complexity, weird behaviours, bugs and failure modes. When operating under normal circumstances and low load, this is somewhat working and we think we understand computers. However, when we put them under pressure, in noisy environments, or just use many of them, we observe weird and often harmful behaviours. Troubleshooting and understanding those requires to dig through those abstraction layers and realize we don’t really understand computers.