I'm Dominic D'Apice, a developer working on Azure infrastructure for AI in
Montréal. I build and operate the platforms that data scientists and ML engineers stand on:
Databricks environments, data pipelines, and the automation that keeps them secure,
compliant and boring in the best sense of the word.
From the machine room to AI
I started in 1998 doing internal IT and client support. A few years later I was installing
Linux servers and appliances, then running physical and virtual fleets. Between 2015 and 2018
I worked on standardization and patching for more than 1,000 servers, which is where I learned
that consistency beats heroics.
From 2018 I moved to self-service cloud and Infrastructure as Code, in regulated environments
where a change has to be traceable before it can be fast. Since 2026 my work sits where
infrastructure meets data science: Azure for AI, Databricks platforms, MLOps and DataOps,
Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD.
Twenty-five years in, one rule has not moved: anything done twice by hand deserves to be
automated.
What I care about
Reliability
A system that holds at 3 a.m. matters more than a clever one. I design for the rollback before the release.
Sharing
I write down what I learn, in French and in English, so the next person gets there faster than I did.
Curiosity
Data science a quarter of a century into an infrastructure career, and the sky on every clear night.
Memory
The systems I admire are the ones that last: Voyager, still talking after 49 years, and a star with my father's name.
Learning in public
I'm finishing a University Certificate in Data Science at
Université TÉLUQ and testing
the theory on Kaggle.
Hackathons keep me honest: a bilingual mental-health guardrail at Mila (top 15 of 80 teams), an
emotional drift detector, and the write-ups that go with them.
LabML, my machine
learning lab that runs entirely in the browser, is where I try things before I write about them.
The blog mixes field notes from production with what I'm learning, and I
say which is which.
After dark
Astronomy and physics are how I rest. I read space missions the way I read production systems:
Voyager as the oldest system in production,
Rubin as the newest. Every morning
the site picks up NASA's picture of the day on its own.
Vincenzo
My father, Vincenzo D'Apice (1937-2022), taught me that you show up and you finish the job.
A star in Andromeda carries his name: ν Andromedae, 617 light-years away, visible to the naked
eye from Montréal. You'll find its gold somewhere on every page of this site.
His story is here.
The best way to reach me is LinkedIn.
My code is on GitHub, my
experience on the resume, and what I'm focused on right now on the
now page.