Hi, I’m Sylvain Bougerel#
I’m a software engineer and the Co-founder & CTO at Canterly, where we’re building a SaaS platform to modernize the underserved equestrian ecosystem. I built the platform end-to-end — including a bespoke scheduling and billing engine. Canterly is now running across 3 AWS regions, handling 20,000+ events a month.
Before Canterly, I spent two decades working on high-availability systems serving millions of users a day. At Grab, I led the SOX 404 compliance program ahead of their NYSE listing. Earlier, I built the deployment platform behind their journey to continuous delivery — supporting 700 engineers shipping 500 microservices up to 60 times a day. I walk through the details in a talk. Before that, at Thales, I worked on mission-critical systems — the kind where bugs have real-world consequences.
I’ve grown to love engineering-efficiency work — DevOps, CI/CD, SRE — and a fail-fast culture built on automation. Lately I’ve been leaning into AI, daily-driving Claude Code and sometimes performing large-scale refactors across our codebase at Canterly. I do think about its footprint, though — which is part of why I’m increasingly reaching for local LLMs as the technology matures.
I’m a long-time Linux and Emacs enthusiast. I usually spend my spare time working on the tools I love and use daily, like sharpening my note-taking workflow with org-mode and org-roam. I used to maintain a C++ library called Spatial which was production-grade and used for research. I’m hoping to eventually get the time to revive it and modernize it, may be even port it to Rust.
You can reach out to me by 📫 email; my email is hosted on Gmail, just use my first name, dot, last name (in the order written above).
Personal projects#
logseq-org-roam#
The last project I worked on. I currently prefer Logseq for org note taking on the go. I wrote this project to make org-roam and Logseq more interoperable, so I can continue to use both together at my desk and on the go.
autosync-git#
A simple package to automate synchronization with a Git remote and other tasks, when using Emacs. This tool is designed for personal use, in places where you’d prefer to use Git over a tool like Syncthing to synchronize personal notes.
Spatial C++ Library#
A generic C++ library that I wrote with the intention of providing re-balancing K-d trees structures in a familiar STL-like API, supporting common spatial operations. Re-balancing K-d trees are useful in scenarios where numerous objects are constantly updated.
ESLint plugin Next “use client” boundary#
A Typescript ESLint plugin for Next.js projects that enforces serializable props for exported components in ‘use client’ modules. This rule aims to emulate the Next.js Typescript server rule reference implementation here.
Contributor to Libkdtree++#
One of the main contributors to libkdtree++, notably improved the performance of the nearest-neighbor search algorithm by 2 orders of magnitude.