There is a special sort of comedy in coding an email. The page can be handsome in a browser, impeccable on a phone and perfectly ordinary in Gmail, then arrive in one version of Outlook dressed like a ransom note. Modern web habits meet old rendering engines. Tables nest inside tables. Small choices acquire the diplomatic delicacy of a border dispute. For years, this was simply the tariff developers paid for entering the inbox.
Nicolas Garnier looked at that mess and made a career-changing decision: the machine should carry more of it. At Mailjet, he took charge of MJML, a markup language designed to let people write clear, semantic components and compile them into the defensive HTML that email clients demand. The framework did not persuade Outlook and Gmail to agree. It spared developers from attending every argument.
Today Garnier works in product at Canary Technologies, whose software handles another deceptively simple human exchange: a hotel serving a guest. The setting has changed from an inbox to a lobby, but his recurring subject has not. He gravitates toward systems where complexity accumulates backstage, then asks how a product might keep that complexity away from the person at the front.
A business student wanders into the code
Garnier did not begin with a conventional engineering education. He studied business and marketing at Audencia in France. Programming arrived as a hobby, then refused to remain one. He has said that he became hooked and taught himself, particularly around JavaScript, React and Node. That combination - commercial training plus enough technical appetite to build - placed him in the useful borderland called developer relations.
Developer relations asks for an unusual bilingualism. One must understand what engineers dislike, explain what a product can do, carry complaints back to the people making it and sometimes open an editor to prove the point. Garnier began in the field in 2013, interned with Microsoft's developer-relations team and joined Mailjet in 2015. He traveled to meetups and conferences, worked around the email API and listened to the people who were attempting to build with it.
That listening mattered because email development is full of grievances that sound petty until one has lost an afternoon to them. Different clients support different slices of CSS. Responsive layouts require fallbacks. An attractive message may be technically valid and practically useless. Garnier described the matter without ceremony: “Email coding is a pain, and it's even worse to try to code responsive emails.” It is the sort of product insight that begins less like a vision statement than an exhausted sigh.
The framework that absorbed the nuisance
MJML began inside Mailjet as a way to generate responsive HTML for Passport, the company's email editor. Its bargain was straightforward. A developer could use a vocabulary of sections, columns, text, buttons and images. The compiler would translate those intentions into the elaborate markup required by actual inboxes. Garnier called it an intermediate language, sitting between what a developer writes and the HTML a recipient finally receives.
Mailjet released MJML as open source in February 2016. Garnier took the lead that May, as attention around the project grew. The timing suited his mixed background. MJML was code, certainly, but it was also a community, a documentation problem, a product roadmap and an argument about what should be easy. He could meet developers on their ground and then translate their needs into priorities.
“I discovered programming as a hobby while studying and instantly got hooked, becoming a self-taught developer.”Nicolas Garnier
The framework's appeal lay in restraint. It did not promise infinite control with no consequences. It offered useful components, responsive defaults and an escape hatch for customization. Developers could create their own components; designers could reason about a grid; teams could inspect the generated result. MJML acknowledged the constraints of email and turned them into a product boundary.
The public repository now has more than 18,000 GitHub stars. That count is imperfect as a measure of use, but useful as evidence of attention sustained over a decade. Garnier still pins MJML on his personal GitHub profile and describes himself, with parental cheer, as its “proud daddy.” Software biographies rarely permit tenderness. Open source occasionally does.
Growing up with Mailjet
MJML was the conspicuous creation, but Mailjet became Garnier's broader education in companies. He remembered arriving at a small Paris office when the organization had fewer than 50 employees. Over almost six years he moved from developer relations toward product leadership, eventually leading product and strategy. The company grew into the hundreds. He moved to New York. He saw venture funding, private-equity ownership and an acquisition from inside the building.
His work also widened from developers to teams. In 2018, explaining Mailjet's collaboration toolkit, Garnier described studying how marketers, colleagues and agencies actually made campaigns together. Email software had traditionally behaved as if one person wrote, approved and sent a message. Real organizations passed drafts among many hands. Comments, roles and real-time collaboration made the product resemble the work rather than the org chart's polite fiction.
The translation route
When Garnier left in 2020, his farewell was notably specific about what he had learned: product, strategy, different funding structures, acquisition and the cultural education of moving cities. He did not narrate the period as a smooth promotion ladder. It sounded more like an apprenticeship in changing scale, with all the revised assumptions that growth demands.
Short chapters, recurring questions
The years after Mailjet were more itinerant. Garnier worked as a senior product manager at Gorgias, the customer-service platform for ecommerce brands. He joined Treat in early 2022 to build product at a young ecommerce company. He also advised Sensorpro, an email-marketing business, in his first non-executive board role. His public biography later described him as building something new at Primary Venture Partners, the New York seed firm.
These jobs sit in adjacent neighborhoods. Email, customer support and ecommerce all concern a conversation between a business and a person, usually at the moment when attention is scarce and patience thinner. Product work there is not solely a matter of adding features. It is choreography: deciding what the customer sees, what the operator knows and which repetitive burdens the software can quietly remove.
There is also a founder's cadence in Garnier's route, even when he is operating inside another company. He likes the early question, the blanker page, the point where a problem is still being named. His own record gives no license to call him a founder of Canary - the company was founded by Harman Singh Narula and Satjot Sawhney - but it does show repeated proximity to zero-to-one product work.
The industries change. The product instinct is remarkably stable: find the awkward handoff, absorb its complexity, and leave the user with a smaller decision.
The inbox meets the lobby
At Canary Technologies, the complexity is operational and physical. Hotels coordinate check-in, payments, messages, requests, upsells and staff responses across systems that guests should never need to understand. A traveler sees a room, a phone and perhaps a tired person behind a desk. The software sees identity, inventory, timing, security and a dozen possible handoffs.
This is fertile territory for someone formed by email's hidden incompatibilities. Both domains punish the user for backstage fragmentation. Both involve communication that must arrive in the right form, on the right device and at the right time. Both become conspicuous when they fail. Nobody congratulates a confirmation message for rendering correctly or a check-in for finding the reservation. Friction is noticed; fluency disappears.
Garnier's public profiles are economical about his precise remit at Canary. His own GitHub says simply “Product,” while a public company directory lists him as Lead Product Manager. The restraint suits the story. The durable fact is not a title but a craft practiced across contexts: he moves among developers, operators and customers, treating their misunderstandings as design material.
Colleagues have praised his technical knowledge, curiosity, accountability and sense of humor. An old Devpost biography supplied corroborating mischief, announcing that he rode ostriches and ate calzones. The line is charming partly because it violates the solemn conventions of the professional bio. The ostrich remains unverified by photographic evidence. The calzone, at least, is plausible.
A product career made at the borders
Technology companies like clean labels. Engineer. Marketer. Founder. Executive. Garnier's career has been productive precisely because the labels overlap. A business graduate learned JavaScript. A developer advocate became a product leader. An internal tool became a public framework. Community work became strategy. Paris became New York.
The thread is translation, but translation should not be mistaken for mere explanation. In software, the translator often changes the thing being explained. Listening to developers alters an API. Watching teams pass drafts around alters collaboration software. Seeing hotel staff juggle requests alters automation. The translator notices where one group has been forced to carry another group's complexity and redesigns the exchange.
MJML remains the cleanest example. Its syntax could not abolish the absurdities of email HTML, so it relocated them. The framework learned the ugly details on behalf of everyone using it. That modest transfer produced a tool with global reach and gave Garnier a public signature before his career reached its second decade.
The hotel lobby presents a new collection of ugly details. They will not fit into four cheerful letters, and they involve more humans, more urgency and occasionally luggage. Still, the proposition is familiar. Good software accepts that the world is complicated. Good product work decides, with care, who should be spared the complication.