Overview

Status

• Born on November 4, 1977 (28 years old), French nationality
• Lives with his fiancée

Professional experience

INstitut Supérieur d'Informatique Appliquée (INSIA) · 09/30/2002–present day

Having been at the heart of INSIA's almost overnight transformation into a top-notch IT college (with required year-long part-time internships, a form of education called “alternance” in France), I've had the privilege to work with Emmanuel le Chevoir and Adrien Urban, two excellent IT engineers of superior skills and knowledge, bursting with energy and passion.

Today (November 2005), INSIA has gone a long way already, and is located in Paris' 20th district. I'm co-CTO, head of the Software Engineering dept and in charge of internal software developments. I teach mostly J2SE, J2EE and C++ (the gods of IT willing, before long I'll be teaching Ruby, too).

Freelance software architect · Paris, 10/01/2001–09/29/2002

After the Posse ended, I wanted to get self-employed for a while, and put to work again all the skills and experience I had gained on Web projects. I took over the Comvivial project to finish it, and accepted the mission to design and develop Spectaculaire!, a rich-content IMDb-style portal, for a production company specializing in theater plays trailers.

Posse42 · Paris, 07/01/2000–09/30/2001

I headed R&D from day 1, after co-founding the company. I supervised all projects, both internal and customer-driven, managing 10+ developers. Leveraged technologies ranged from HTML to Java to Haskell, from Linux to FreeBSD to Windows XP…

None Networks · Paris, 05/25/1999–12/20/1999

With help from Mathias Hiron and, most importantly, Sébastien Carlier, we designed and implemented, in barely 3 weeks, Europe's first 100%-JSP Web portal, while specifications were still watermarked with a big fat “Beta”: Freesbee.fr. The project's titanic scale, combined with the extremely narrow production window, earned us the nickname “Dream Team”. I stayed onboard long enough to develop the two next versions and transfer competence over, then switched to 100% Cogisoft work.

Borland (USA) · Scotts Valley, CA, 10/01/1998–01/15/1999

Granting myself one of my fondest wishes at the time, I went to work at Borland's HQ. I shattered quite a string of record times there, ending up contributing to R&D within 3 months, when the usual delay seemed more like 3 years. In the meantime, I prodived tech support to developers nationwide, and designed and taught the internal training program (Delphi Interns Training) about all the new stuff in Delphi 4.

Cogisoft · Paris, 01/16/1996–06/30/2000

I got in Cogisoft during my first year at prominent IT college EPITA, having been noticed by Julien Brunet, then two years ahead of me, and one of their lead R&D developers. I had turned 18 just two months before. In close to 5 years, I did just about any job available there, from small contributions to customer projects to Borland-certified or custom, high-tech training (over 3,000 hours as a trainer), to audit, to customer-site development, to tech conference (4 memorable sessions at BorCon France 1997), to technical book editing (French version of Delphi 3 Unleashed), to architecturing and implementing the largest part of their products in R&D.

Education

EPITA · South Paris, 09/1995·07/2000

I discovered EPITA kinda late, just a couple months before my Baccalauréat (France's massive exam ending high school). I got in and won my way to the finals at Prologin 1995 (Prologin is France's national programming contest, now gateway to the IOI French team selection; I was organizer and assignment author at editions 1996 through 2000), and decided I would study at EPITA, period. At the time, there was a fabulous atmosphere there, a passion you'd hardly find today… Overall, I confess to not having attended much class, especially during my senior year: I spent most of my time working at Cogisoft! I then did my Masters in Software Engineering under the excellent direction of Philippe Laroque (who left EPITA a year later).

Lycée Victor Hugo · Caen, 09/1992–06/1995

You seldom see high schools on resumes, but I feel like citing it, because I really had a hell of a good time there, which is seldom enough in French high schools to mention. Almost brand new, very luminous and well-equipped, it is the place where I really worked up my passion for IT and especially programming. My “TDD” nickname (which, unfortunately, is a common English acronym) was bestowed upon me during my first year there. I enjoyed privileged relationships with a few teachers, most notably Mr. Peschard (IT), Mr. Lobo (Philosophy) and Mrs. Tartiere (English). This high school gave me plenty of space to blossom and experiment (IT club, school newspaper, lots of responsibilities for the taking…).

Miscellanea

• I read a lot, and I'm a sucker for Orson Scott Card and Neal Stephenson.
• I listen to all kinds of music, except trash and heavy metal.
• I'm an addicted movie-goer, and stick to undubbed versions. I was among the very first subscribers to UGC's Illimited service.
• I love travelling, especially abroad. To this day, I've gone to most of Western Europe, Turkey, Tunisia, South Africa, Tahiti and the USA.
• I always have so many projects going on, many of them are obviously on hold (sigh).
• Maybe one day I'll stop sitting on my hands and write a great technical book, write a good movie script, and act in a good movie.