Lead Developer
Full Stack Ruby On Rails
DevOps engineer

I don't give answers, I teach how to find them.

portrait de Jean-François Labbé

Freelance

What can I do?

Lead your team
I pair with your developers to guide them aquiring new skills relevant to your business
Your technical guide
Got a new idea an need someone to guide you on the technical side
Setup best practices
Configure your stack to automatically enforce best practices
Refactor smelly code
Got code no-one dares to approach?
Upgrade your development process
Agile is good but there's better
Implement DevOps
Allow your teams to deliver faster

My preferred stack

No bullshit, one stack, one man army

  • Ruby On Rails

    The most productive framework, enables small teams to deliver applications fast.
    Does it scale ? I guess so, it's used by Github, Shopify, Airbnb, Bloomberg, ZenDesk, Groupon, Twitch.

  • PostgreSQL

    Battle tested open source database, great managing tools, many hosted options.
    Want to store documents ? Add a json column to your table 🤯
    Want to store timeseries ? Use Timescale

  • Tailwind CSS

    Tailwindcss

    Utility-first CSS framework
    I've never been able to remember CSS properties and possible values but I can easily remember tailwindcss utility classes.

  • Turbolinks & StimulusJs

    Why would you use React to build a form ?
    Why maintaining two applications (back and front) ?
    With Turbolinks you get the single page application feeling, StimulusJs brings Javascript interactivity were needed. SPA like applications without the hassle.

Other tools

  • Elasticsearch need to search really fast and your database cannot manage the load ?
  • Docker the way to build immutable application container
  • Git how is that possible to manage source code without it?
  • Heroku easiest way, no brainer, to deploy a web application
  • MySQL another great SQL store
  • Mongodb the document store, so easy to start with, so hard to scale
  • Rancher manage kubernetes clusters
  • Redis as a job queue or application cache store
  • Rspec is a good testing tool
  • Terraform infa as code
  • Vagrant fastest way to spin up virtual machine
  • Vuejs if I have no option but to use a frontend framework I would choose vuejs

Project management

Agile and experimenting with ShapeUp

I learned Agile methodology back in 2008 during an intership in Netherlands. It was awesome to see a pluridisiplinary team working together to create a new folding machine.

Agile was such a great way to manage the project, I found it incredible. Sadly all the other usage I've seen were broken.

There is a new refreshing methodology comming from Basecamp, it is ShapeUp. Whant to know more? need guidance to implement it with your team?

Contact me.

Staying sharp

I'm an eternal student

What's next

The art of postgresql

Observability

What I am exploring now

Mastering Object oriented, architecture decision records

What I explored

TDD, Ruby, RubyOnRails, Tailwindcss, RefactoringUI, Agile, Xp, REQB, CFTL

ShapeUp, Demand-side sales

A bit of history

I am an embedded software developer turned web application lead developer.
Intrigued?

Once upon a time

I've always been told that I dismantled everything when I was a child. I wanted to understand how it worked. I ended up with and electronic board full of mysterious things looking like centipede. Too be continued...