about

I’m Alexandre De Dommelin, most people call me Alex. I’m the Co-Founder and CTO of Panop, where we help organizations figure out what their external attack surface really looks like. You can’t defend what you don’t know you have.

Twenty-plus years in IT security. My days go into building and protecting large, high-traffic systems; my nights go the other way, breaking things to understand how attackers actually think. The two sides sharpen each other, and I’d rather work with people who hold both.

I’ve designed infrastructure where security was part of the architecture from the start, not bolted on after the fact. I write Go and PHP most days, still reach for Perl and Bash when they fit, and have strong opinions about automation and configuration management I’m happy to debate.

specialties

GNU/Linux · web security & performance · networking · CDNs · WAFs · offensive security · cloud-native architecture · secure software development.

on AI

AI is reshaping human work and society at a pace most people underestimate: the impact on knowledge workers, individual futures, and social structure. I sit closer to Daniel Miessler’s framing than to “AGI is overhyped.” The disruption is concrete, the timeline is shorter than people want to admit, and the leverage goes to people who build with the tools, not to those who wait them out.

tools

Nova, my AI assistant, sits in the terminal as a build partner and on Telegram as a fast-capture surface for everything else. Same framing as the AI section above: leverage tool, not replacement. Building with it is the whole point of the augmentation bet.

elsewhere

• LinkedIn: the professional surface.
• GitHub: open-source work, mostly forks and small tools.
• I keep a now page: what I’m focused on this season, not a CV.

If we haven’t met yet, cold email works. Open with the ask in one paragraph and I’ll either answer or not.