Founder Origins: Jay Paulynice

In the next couple editions of Cloud Musings, I thought I would take some time and talk about founder origins. I’ll go first and then do Paul, my co-founder, in the next edition.

I grew up in the Boston area for most of my life, but I was born in Haiti, a small island shared with the Dominican Republic. In High School, my name got shorten to Jules and though a lot of people know me by Jules, it’s not correct. My given name is Jules Andre. Professionally, everyone knows me by Jay. After High School, I studied engineering at Cornell and did my graduate studies at Northeastern in Information Systems.

I got interested in computers when my dad’s friend was throwing away a bunch of bulky old computers, but my dad took them to Haiti to open a school for kids to learn computers. That was back in 1999. When I moved to America, I learned more about computers and programming in high school. At home, we had a Compaq computer, which we could connect to the dial up phone line to surf the internet. Back then, the only way I was able to procure a copy of Visual Studio was through a friend who burned a copy for me. That’s how I learned Visual Basic and C++. The only other way to code was after school in the computer lab.

Fast forward to today, I’ve been a software engineer for 15 years with experiences at Akamai Technologies, Putnam Investments, General Electric as well as many early stage startups.

I'm generally interested in open source, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and cloud native. I have strong experience designing and architecting applications for frontend (React, Redux, Typescript), backend (Python, Java, Scala) as well as structured and document databases (Elasticsearch, MongoDB, MySQL, Postgres, and Oracle)

On a personal note, I have 2 sons and 2 nieces. When I’m not working or doing anything important, I like to spend time with family, listen to music, going to the gym, play Basketball, and read.

Here are some things I do for fun:

Strength training

I haven’t been to the gym as much since the pandemic, but weight lifting gives me peace of mind and a sense of purpose. If you are wondering my big 3 (bench press, squat, deadlift) combined is 1000 lbs.

Hiking

To me, there is something majestic about mountains. Here I went hiking in the White Mountains in New Hampshire. This specific trail is Mount Willard, overlooking the Crawford Notch.

Concerts

Not much to say there, other than I like music. Here is Ziggy Marley performing at Bold Point Park in Rhode Island.

Watch sports

I’m generally a big fan of the Celtics and Patriots. I don’t watch as much college sports, but I’ll watch Basketball during March Madness.

Thanks for reading!

Jay