First employee at Virtuo, french mobility scale-up (part of FT120). We are building the alternative of car ownership by removing all the frictions a customer could face in a traditional car rental company. In 2022, the company operate in 6 different European countries.

When we’ve started the company, I was mainly focus on shipping high value features. Today, my daily tasks evolved and my missions are:

• Managing up to 7 people, mostly tech leads (approximatively 20 back-end developers in 2022 in tech department).
• Improving the developer experience with SREs (continuous deployment, code quality tooling, performance, reliability and observability).
• Designing code architecture with back-end developers (ensure the proper implementation regarding biggest features).
• Recruiting new comers next to the CTO and tech leads.

Here’s a list of few things I’m the most proud of having build during the last 7 years:

• An environment of more than 50 micro-services. First we were hosted at Heroku and since 2020 at GCP (Kubernetes):
  • Most of micro-services are backed by a MongoDB database.
  • Home made service discovery mechanism (based on Websockets).
  • Long tasks delegated to a queue mechanism (using RabbitMQ).
  • Sessions and cache on Redis.
  • Progressive Typescript migration.
• Full autonomous CI/CD (CircleCI and ArgoCD) with a thousands of unit, integration and e2e tests that release (many times per days) without any human interactions. Production releases are scheduled every 10 min or can be manually triggered by a Slack bot.
• Ephemeral platform instances, at start on AWS EC2 (with docker-compose and terraform) and then on GCP (Kubernetes). Those instances are build on demand by the developers for the QA team in order to test the features before going to production.

Neowebcar is a digital showcase for automotive retailers with the goal to help them to put their stock of new vehicles for sale online. In collaboration with the funders, sales team and the customer support we built the features to rock on. My main missions were:

• Marketing side: with 700K+ unique visitors every month, the SEO and SEM were the main source of traffic. Editorial optimisation + web pages performance (mainly DOMContentLoaded and TTFB), a big focus on Google Page Speed and lead conversions.
• Engineering: development of our own technology to import big CSV files with retailers vehicles (all in different formats), transform it and match each lines with a vehicles catalog from L’Argus.
• Maintenance of the platform (3 to 5 VMs with databases replication and backup) hosted at OVH.

The technology stack was nginx, PHP (php-fpm), MySQL, linux (Centos or RedHat), a bit of NodeJS for image resizing and some Redis database for cache, sessions and queues.

We were 3 engineers at maximum (with one intern).

KerniX is a web agency and my main mission was the development of many websites:

• Taking the needs from the customers
• Development from scratch (in partnership with UI designers)
• Delivery and maintenance

Our customers had very various needs, here’s few examples:

• Familytrip: hotel nights booking website dedicated to families.
• Neowebcar: marketplace for automotive retailers to put online their stock of new vehicles (sold to L’Argus/leboncoin).
• Resaplace: booking service for car parking spaces for Effia.

The main technology was a self hosted LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) platform on bare metal RedHat servers.

I used to have one intern to manage.