About
Iām Olivier, a passionate web developer; this is a website where I share my discoveries and things I've learnt through my years coding.
Iām French, spent my young years in the Bordeaux and Annecy areas, and as soon as I finished my 2 years at uni I moved to Paris š... where I stayed for 16 years.
In 2017 I moved to the beautiful city of Edinburgh, where I'm currently still living. š“ó §ó ¢ó ³ó £ó “ó æ
On the technical side of things...
I started my career working for web agencies with Flash and PHP. For a few years my job was to build silly little games š¹ļø in Flash - it was tons of fun!
I had the opportunity to also use other technologies over the years to build various types of projects: Ruby On Rails, Zend Framework, Drupal, Java, Perl, TCL/Tk...
However, in the last few years I've been narrowing my field of expertise to the following areas:
- On the frontend side, after the end of Flash I switched to JavaScript, and then to TypeScript and React in 2018.
- On the backend side, after 16 years of PHP I switched to Python š in 2018. I also worked on several projects with Node.js, for which I built one of the first database abstraction layers in 2011 š
My resume already presents my technical skills and interests, but long story short: these last few years I've been primarily focusing on the following technologies: Python, Django, TypeScript, Node.js and React.
For my side projects I like using "simple enough" technologies, that just gets the job done quickly: Django, SQLite, Tailwind CSS...
Side projects
ZakuChess, my open source wb game ā
If you're a casual chess player like me (my ELO must be around 1000, so yeah pretty casual š) you can have a go at the open source game I built:
- ZakuChess, a "daily chess challenge with heroic fantasy characters" game āļø š”ļø
This blog
This blog started as a bunch of Markdown files thrown into a Material For MKDocs template, before blogs were even supported by the platform.
But as I kinda like having more control over what I'm using, I ended up rebuilding it from scratch using Django, on top of which I added my own "static generation" layer.
I know there are already such generators in the wild, but I enjoy building that kind of tool so I did it anyway š.
If that sounds of any interest to you, you can find the source code of this blog on Github.
My resume
For the same reason, I also built my own "static generation" layer to create my resume.
Pretty much the same tools I used for this blog, with less pages (I only have one, in 2 languages) but an extra feature to generate a PDF version of it.
You can find the source code of my resume generator on Github.