Hassy Veldstra

Yo, you gotta hear about Hassy Veldstra. Dude’s one of those tech guys who just jumped into the deep end and crushed it. He’s the founder of Artillery, this sick load testing platform that’s basically changing how DevOps and SRE teams do their thing. Started all this back in 2021, based out of Limerick, Ireland – not your typical startup hub, but Hassy made it happen.

So here’s the deal: he’s an open-source junkie, has a background as a Site Reliability Engineer, and his whole mission is to help dev teams ship faster and more reliable systems – no BS, just real results. That’s why he built Artillery, which isn’t just a company but also a huge open-source project. I mean, it’s got nearly 7,000 stars on GitHub – that’s a lot of devs vibing with his work worldwide. Thousands of teams use it to stress-test their apps, make sure shit doesn’t break under pressure, and keep everything running smooth.

And get this – he’s not just some random coder. Hassy’s the lead dev of Artillery.io, and he’s super active in the community, always pushing performance testing and dev tooling forward. His work caught the eye of Y Combinator, and he crushed it in the S21 batch. They threw over $2 million his way, which is no joke. That shows how much faith investors have in what he’s building and his vision.

Looking at his process, what jumps out is that he’s all about making complex stuff simple and reliable. He’s the type who saw a problem – how to test systems better – and just went all-in. His background as an SRE gives him that real-world vibe: he’s been on the ground, knows what dev teams struggle with daily, and built Artillery to solve those pain points.

Hassy’s story is about someone who saw a bullshit gap in performance testing, jumped into open source, built something the community loves, and then scaled it into a legit company. His motivation? Making tech better, faster, more reliable. He’s all about pushing the envelope and helping teams ship without fear – he’s not just into creating cool tools, he’s here to shake up the game and make sure everyone’s winning.

So yeah, Hassy Veldstra? He’s that dude who took his SRE experience, turned it into a killer open-source project, then turned that into a YC-backed startup – all from Limerick, no less. That’s the real deal right there.