About ZpqrtBnk

My name is Stephan Gay and I am located in Paris, France. I have always had a passion for "computer science" at large, be it hard-core developement or interacting with users to architect the most relevant solutions.

In my past lives, I have hacked on the Apple ][, traced issues in Linux kernels, reversed-engineered and released Rick Dangerous's clone xrick... but also spent six years managing large projects at HP, four years managing the Internet infrastructure of a large french press group, or four years doing polyglot (Java+Python+Go+.NET) development for Hazelcast's leading high-performance in-memory computing platform.

I am an Umbraco (the friendly open-source CMS for the Microsoft .NET stack) expert and have been a sponsored contributor and architect for most of today's backend code. I am less involved now, but whenever I can find enough time for it, I still try to contribute to various open-source communities.

I usually work as an independent consultant through my French-registered company Pilotine and help companies with their Internet infrastucture and development. However, that activity is currently on-hold as I am fully engaged with Datadog helping scale their leading monitoring solution.

And when away from computers, I enjoy spending time with my wife & 4 children, and sailing on anything that has one or more hulls and goes with the wind, including my own SL16 catamaran.

What does ZpqrtBnk mean?

Nothing. It is a sequence of letter that I remember using as a kid to infuriate my youngest brother, by pretending it had a secret meaning. Later on at school, I was tasked with writing a Prolog interpreter. These things are all named "XL-Prolog" or "VF-Prolog" or whatever. I named mine "ZB-Prolog", and when asked about the meaning of "ZB", proudly answered it stood for "ZpqrtBnk".

I have been using that name for most of my software activities since that time.

What is a software ektropist?

The tagline in this site's header originally read "software ektropist".

In life thermodynamics, ektropy "refers to the energetics related to morphic order or generating order or form in ordinary space" (source). The term was introduced in 1900 by German writer Georg Hirth to be antonym to entropy—entropy being commonly understood as a "measure of disorder".

So, a "software ektropist" could be seen as someone trying to generate order or form in the software space, which pretty well describes most of my activities. Considering that thermodynamics states that entropy never decreases (source) some may consider it a lost cause. It's fun, nevertheless.