I was born in Bucharest, Romania, where I played ~5,000 hours of Pokémon. I started a software company when I was 18; we built stuff for the Gates Foundation, the University of Oxford, the Swiss Post and others.

I moved to Manchester, England to study computer science, then moved to Basel, Switzerland, which became the place that most feels like home. While in Basel, I continued to run my company and studied computational biology.

10 years into running my company, I decided to shut it down when I realised that the work was joyless, and that I had become an exploitative employer — uh oh! I had a lot of learning to do.

I moved back to the UK to research the ethics of work, with a focus on Open Source software, which became an ongoing PhD in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.

In 2024, I started working on the Open Source Pledge, where I helped raise $9,200,672 for Open Source maintainers. This taught me a lot about serious issues in Open Source software: underfunding, precarious security, and maintainer burnout.

To work on these problems, I founded the Software Stewardship Lab, a non-profit applied research lab where we protect the world's Open Source infrastructure. Without this infrastructure, critical services like healthcare and transportation would break.

In my spare time, I do my very best to pet cats, play touching video games, and be kind. You can see some of my journey documented on the photos page.

I changed my name in 2026 — it used to be Vlad‑Stefan Harbuz.

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