About Me
Hi! My name is Marc-André Cournoyer. I live in Montréal, Canada.
I’ve been programming for more than 30 years. Started with Commodore BASIC, then Visual Basic, then the usual suspects — Java, C, .NET — before falling for Ruby, which kept me busy for a decade. These days I use AI extensively for coding, 3D printing, and automating all the boring parts of my life.
I am currently building two things:
- my version of the office of the future (more on that soon), and
- my dream sample / looper.
A few things I’m proud of:
- Thin was one of the most popular Ruby web servers, with over 200 million downloads. It powered a good chunk of the early Rails era.
- Create Your Own Programming Language, my book on building languages from scratch, cited as an inspiration for CoffeeScript and used by the creators of many languages since.
- NeuralConvo, the first open-source conversational language model. In 2016 it reproduced Google’s Neural Conversational Model paper — chatting with neural networks trained on movie subtitles, years before it was cool.
Along the way I launched and sold a few online businesses, was Principal Engineer at two Fortune 500 companies, and taught thousands of developers through my online courses on Rails, event loops, neural networks, and programming languages. The rest of my open source work lives on GitHub.
You can email me at macournoyer@gmail.com and find me on X.