Loïc Tosser

Loïc Tosser, known across the open-source realms as wowi42, is a French software engineer and Chief Technology Officer based in Dubai. After graduating from EPITECH and spending an exchange year at Bonch-Bruevich State University of Telecommunications in Saint Petersburg, where the winter taught him that -25°C builds character and compiling kernels builds patience, he settled in the Gulf. For over twelve years he has served as CTO for startups, scale-ups and government bodies.

His craft is infrastructure that refuses to die. He writes Python, C and Crystal every day, and keeps Go, Zig, Gleam, Elixir and Mint within reach. Rust he has banished from the hall: evil, he calls it, the new Java. He forges automated infrastructure on FreeBSD and Alpine Linux. He bends PostgreSQL, Quickwit and Parquet to his will. His law is simple: a deploy done twice by hand is a deploy done wrong. He runs his own servers and preaches self-hosting and data sovereignty, rather than renting his freedom from the cloud giants: Kalvad's whole stack runs on one self-hosted server that costs less per month than a team lunch.

Open source is both his training ground and his tribute. He has contributed to PyInfra, Arch Linux, Alpine Linux, Python and Django. He forges his own weapons in the open, most recently lecode, a minimalist terminal AI coding agent, and leaves the Kalvad forge gates open behind him: infraninja, django-cloudflare-images and a growing pack of MCP servers. In 2026 he took the stage at FOSDEM to argue that infrastructure deserves real code, not YAML soup, a heresy the crowd greeted with applause and only mild torch-waving.

As a leader he rebuilds engineering cultures around quality, automation and honest metrics: at Kalvad alone, 200 projects delivered for more than 100 clients. As a mentor he has coached early-stage founders through the SANDBOX program. Off the clock he lifts heavy barbells and puts them down again, a discipline he finds remarkably similar to uptime.

Rumors about the man travel faster than his deploys. He designs wooden tables in OpenSCAD, because furniture is just infrastructure you can sit on. He types on keyboards loud enough to wake the ravens. He owns a notification system named Moustash and a meeting machine named Hubert that writes its own notes. And he has never, ever deployed on a Friday.