Moving to freelance in 2024 marked the beginning of a journey which has kept broadening my expertise in many ways. Since then, I have launched two R&D initiatives, contributed to several well-established open-source projects and completed a first major customer contract. It also enabled me to start exploring the Energy sector through Digital Substations. All this covers a wide range of topics including mainline Linux kernel, Kubernetes, Web (FastAPI, Mongo, React) and Rust.

Beyond technical know-how, the most important skill I’ve learnt is how to bring abstract ideas to fruition. This applies equally to solo projects and within a team, pure R&D and with customers. Progressing from my previous position as Principal Software Engineer at Collabora, I’ve since acquired the ability to assess situations under new perspectives. A key realisation has been to learn how to work as an independent contractor while remaining a committed team player.

R&D Initiatives

Renelick

Overview Renelick is a full-stack solution to orchestrate tasks and manage the data they produce. Its historical use-case was to test the upstream Linux kernel which is now covered by VIXI. It has since matured into a generic framework which can be applied to pretty much anything: electrical microgrids, home appliances, IT systems monitoring, DevOps…

My role The precursor to Renelick was the new KernelCI API which evolved with lessons learnt from legacy systems and community feedback. While it has been successfully deployed in production, its design was cut short and carried a lot of unrealised potential. I then decided to fork the whole stack and Renelick was born to complete this work. It has now reached its v1.0 milestone with VIXI as its first real-world application.

Open Substation

Overview Open Substation is a community-driven initiative to provide a complete open-source software stack for Digital Substations. It is currently based on a handful of initial projects with the aim to grow over time via new individual contributors and organisations.

My role After studying electronics at university, I first wanted to work in renewable energy. However, this was still a very niche sector back in 2007. Since then, a growing awareness of the environmental impact of human activity has led to large, sustained investments and new emerging opportunities. Freelance is giving me the mobility I need to explore and gain the experience required to turn my student aspirations into work. The Energy sector is vast, so after exploring a few avenues I narrowed my quest down to Digital Substations. Along with a few other open-source developers, we joined forces to launch Open Substation early 2026. I’ll be giving a lightning talk at the LFE Summit in Berlin on this topic.

Open Source Contributions

Linux kernel

As one of the most widely used operating system in the world, Linux needs no introduction. I initially did a fair amount of downstream kernel driver development between 2008 and 2016 for embedded devices (Internet radio, touchscreens, ARM GPU driver integration…). I then refocused my efforts upstream starting with the various bugs reported by KernelCI: reviewing, verifying and contributing to fixes. This made me poke at lots of different areas of the code base which gave me some deep insights into the kernel’s inner workings. This is now where VIXI/Renelick are starting to shine.

My latest major contribution is the scripts/container tool to facilitate running kernel builds and any other arbitrary commands in containers. It’s still work in progress and is only one step along the way towards having a comprehensive, common set of container-based tools supported directly upstream.

KernelCI

Overview The first time I heard of KernelCI was in 2016 at a Linaro Connect event. It was still a very informal project back then, led by several kernel developers and maintainers. Its original scope was mostly to build and test the upstream Linux kernel on embedded platforms. It then gradually expanded after joining the Linux Foundation and the team has kept evolving over the years. Quoting its website:

The primary goal of KernelCI is to use an open testing philosophy to ensure the quality, stability and long-term maintenance of the Linux kernel.

My role One of the first customer projects I worked on after joining Collabora in 2017 was aimed at enabling automated testing on Chromebook devices using KernelCI and LAVA. As I had already met in person some of the developers involved, it was a relatively natural progression to join their community. My first actual task was to implement automated bisection for boot test failures, which helped catch critical bugs in linux-next in particular. I was then appointed TSC Chair in 2019 and Board Chair in 2020 as part of the Linux Foundation project and led the transition from the legacy systems to a new, scalable architecture. This also involved making the project more established by spearheading things such as the Sysadmin working group, clearer TSC rules and a UX analysis RFP which led to the new web frontend.

SEAPATH

Overview The Linux Foundation Energy branch acts as an umbrella for about 50 projects encompassing many topics from grid simulation to electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Among them, SEAPATH is one of the most mature and critical ones. It essentially provides a hypervisor OS image along with configuration and deployment tools to run VMs and containers with real-time capabilities. This is a critical requirement when implementing electrical protection functions in Digital Substations.

SEAPATH aims at developing a “reference design” and “industrial grade” open source real-time platform that can run virtualized automation and protection applications.

My role While I haven’t yet committed many changes to the code base itself, joining the SEAPATH community has been a major step in my journey in Energy. I’ve created a tutorial to run the hypervisor with VMs entirely on a laptop for development purposes, which was the basis for the Open Substation Devkit. This was showcased with a demo during a TSC meeting which I’m now attending regularly. I’m looking forward to becoming a more active contributor over the coming months.

Customer Projects

Source.dev

Overview In a nutshell, Source.dev delivers fast Android checkouts and builds using an advanced caching file system called SourceFS. At least this is what I was involved in while working there in 2024 and 2025. As it’s a fast-paced startup, its scope is expanding and adapting rapidly to the industry’s needs with new features and use cases. Its long-term vision is better defined in the following way:

AI-native software tools that accelerate development of next-generation devices

My role As I was just getting started in freelance, Source.dev became my first major customer. I joined during the very early days of the company alongside the CEO and CTO and stayed involved with a part-time rolling contract for over a year. My role was to pick up any task that was required to help get the business off the ground: set up infrastructure deployments using Kubernetes, enable OpenTelemetry, create demos for customers and investors, review and contribute to the core software components. This made me learn new skills very quickly as I kept wearing different hats. Eventually a team of permanent engineers were hired and I handed my duties over to them.

How can I help?

To get in touch and discuss how I might be able to help with your project, please see the contact page or these direct links:

Last modified on 2026-07-25