I grew up with the web: from phpBB to engineering.

Before the web: video games and a computer#

Before I knew what a network was, screens already opened worlds. The original Sonic the Hedgehog on Mega Drive brought speed and colour. The first Adibou on a computer had a different rhythm: playing and learning happened on the same machine.

Tekken 3 on PlayStation and Jet Set Radio Future on the first Xbox followed. I did not separate consoles, software and computers into disciplines. They were machines that made me want to understand the next screen.

ETAJV and my first memories of the web#

The first web I recognised as a place was Jeuxvideo.com and its ETAJV. I went there for Pokémon and GTA guides. At the time, keeping that knowledge locally still meant buying the CD-ROM edition. The distinction between online and offline was concrete.

Prizee.com and OGame gave me reasons to come back. A page could remember a player, change between visits and connect people. The web stopped feeling like a catalogue.

phpBB forums taught me to code#

Those sites led me to ForumDesJoueurs.com, Kloobik.org and its designer community, Titaxium, then Rentabilisez.com among webmasters. Before feeds, a community had familiar names and discussions that remained in place. I learned by reading what other people had tried.

Through those communities, I discovered phpBB and created my first themes and plugins. Changing a visual detail made me open a template. Adding a feature made me follow the code behind it. Curiosity became a practical method: modify something, break it, understand why, then try again.

wii-fr.com: a blog sold at thirteen#

Nintendo’s Revolution became the Wii while I was travelling home. I registered wii-fr.com and built a blog around the announcement. The timing mattered, but the result changed how I looked at the web.

The €2,000 sale did not give me a career at thirteen. It proved that an idea, a domain and enough curiosity could create value beyond my screen. I understood that building for the web could be more than a hobby. I never really left it.

PageRank, search rankings and the web economy#

After wii-fr.com, I created dozens of sites and worked on their search ranking. At the time, services placing casino advertisements could pay several hundred euros per month to appear on a site, with the amount linked to its PageRank. Search visibility had a price.

It was a strange, opportunistic and direct learning loop. I published a page, observed what happened, changed it and started again. The web made cause and effect difficult to ignore.

eRepublik: taking responsibility in a virtual world#

At seventeen, I tried preparatory classes. They did not suit me, so I returned to my secondary school for a Higher Technician Certificate in Electronic Systems. At the same time, I discovered eRepublik and its persistent political and military world.

In its virtual eFrance, I became a member of Congress, general of the armies, then president for several months. The titles were virtual. The people were not. It was a sustained responsibility to a community, long before professional management.

From electronics to systems at scale#

Electronics still fascinates me. The certificate led to an engineering degree at the École Nationale d’Ingénieurs de Brest, then a double degree in Canada at the Université de Sherbrooke. The questions became more formal, but the habit remained: understand the system by building part of it.

Later, I contributed to an industrial IoT platform connecting more than one million devices simultaneously. As Technical Leader, I then designed and delivered a banking-document generation platform processing up to ten million reports a month. Today, I lead ten full-stack engineers in Luxembourg and remain involved in architecture, delivery and production.

The cable is still connected

My Work documents the systems and teams in my professional journey. My Projects gather what I keep building for myself. The article on organizing the Solutions team continues the management story. The scale has changed. The orange cable has not.