Olivier Samyn
Senior Executive at 26 Lights
Brussels, Brussels-Capital, Belgium
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolOlivier Samyn is a civil engineer turned senior IT executive with 12+ years of experience building backend systems, real-time communication services, and web platforms from Brussels. He blends deep open-source Linux expertise with polyglot development skills across Python, TypeScript, Rust, Scala, Java and C/C++, and has practical experience with FastAPI, Django, Axum and PlayFramework. Olivier has applied his engineering rigor to big data (PySpark/Hadoop) and containerized production environments (Podman, Docker, Kubernetes), frequently taking hands-on roles in implementation and automation. As an active contributor to projects like the SILE typesetter and sphinx-autoapi, he has improved PDF/image handling and Python documentation tooling—demonstrating attention to low-level integration and developer experience. At 26 Lights he combines leadership with continued coding involvement, preferring pragmatic solutions over theoretical designs. Colleagues describe him as ready for new challenges and unusually comfortable moving between research-grade problems and production engineering.
12 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Université libre de Bruxelles
French, English, Dutch
Stackoverflow
1,105reputation
76kreached
18answers
0questions
Github Skills (22)
pytest10
python10
image-processing10
sphinx10
document-generation10
lua10
typesetting10
tex10
pdf-generation10
documents10
documentation10
automation9
automations9
jenkins6
playframework6
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
sile-typesetter/sile
Feb 2015 - Apr 2015
The SILE Typesetter — Simon’s Improved Layout Engine
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Automation EngineerContributions:12 commits, 11 PRs, 10 comments in 2 months
Contributions summary:Olivier primarily focused on enhancing the `libtexpdf` outputter within the SILE typesetting engine. Their contributions include enabling PDF image support by integrating `libtexpdf` to compute image sizes, and modifying code to load fonts and handle image bounding boxes. Further, they added input AST transformation tools, and implemented file conversion features to prepare input before processing in SILE.
luapublishingpdfsiletypesetting
readthedocs/sphinx-autoapi
Oct 2019 - Oct 2019
A new approach to API documentation in Sphinx.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 1 PR, 3 comments in 3 days
Contributions summary:Olivier primarily contributed to the `sphinx-autoapi` project by implementing support for implicit namespaces in Python documentation generation. They modified the Python mapper and parser to handle namespace-related file structures and configurations. Their work included writing tests to ensure correct behavior with implicit namespaces and updating documentation to reflect the new functionality. The changes focused on adapting the documentation tool to work with Python 3.3+ features.
apipythonapproachsphinx-extensionapi-documentation
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