Hervé grew up in snow-kissed Montreal, Canada, building igloos in his backyard with his sister, canoeing the lakes of Quebec with his family in the summer, and actually convinced for a while that he enjoyed watching ice hockey. In 2003, standing atop Mount Royal with his freshly minted Computer Science Bachelor's degree firmly in hand, he scanned the horizon, gauged the wind, weighed anchor and set off to see a bit of the world.
After a year studying Russian literature in Quebec City, Hervé moved to Moscow to teach French at the Russian State University for the Humanities, and thence to Saarbrücken, Germany for a master's in computational linguistics. He also worked various software developer jobs over the years, most recently in the Machine Translation research group at the University of Edinburgh. In March 2015 he joined NCR Edinburgh as a Software Engineer, where he discovered that it is actually possible be part of a large, multinational corporation whilst fully retaining the atmosphere and culture of a local startup.
Computer programming is by far his most consuming passion, but he does also have a fondness for map making, languages, space exploration, history, and probably most things that are found in non-fiction books. Whenever he has a spare minute he can usually be found hunched over a keyboard, squinting at an Emacs window. Spare minutes have become a rare commodity since the births of his two young children, but he does get to play with Lego a lot more, which is nearly as satisfying as programming.